What’s a boosted post? It’s a Facebook feature where you pay to get your Facebook posts seen by more people. Why are boosts useful? 
With the organic reach of your Facebook posts decreasing (organic reach means that you haven’t paid for it), it can feel like marketing your business on Facebook is getting harder and harder, as you want your posts to be seen by people who are likely to buy your products and services.
By boosting your post (you can start with a minimum budget of £1 per day), you can ensure that your posts are seen by more people.
You can choose WHO will see your Facebook post that you’ve boosted, and there are over 1200 demographics that you can select to show your post to, and this is one of the reasons that I love Facebook ads so much, as they can be super targeted to show to the audience that you most want to reach. Boosting posts isn’t always the answer though… It is believed by some that boosted posts give you the opportunity to increase business, and this is itself is not untrue. However, when choosing your Facebook ad objective of boosting posts, it’s good to know how Facebook determine who sees your post.
You see, once you’ve selected the post that you want to boost, and you’ve selected a budget, and you’ve chosen your ideal audience, even if you had an endless ad budget, you still wouldn’t reach everyone on Facebook within the audience you’ve selected! YES! THAT’S RIGHT…. You can’t reach EVERYONE that you’ve selected, even with an endless ad budget!!
WHY?
Boosted posts are only shown to the people that Facebook know are likely to engage with posts by either liking or commenting on the posts. Facebook know your Facebook habits (and those of your target audience)! If you like lots of status updates, you’re much more likely to be shown sponsored posts that have a BOOSTED POST objective. Before Facebook introduced algorithms, you would see far more posts about what your friends like, and this used to give a good organic reach beyond your existing audience. However, Facebook newsfeeds are far busier now, so Facebook introduced algorithms to show you more of the stuff that you’re likely to engage with or be interested in. So, now if you boost a post, even if people like the post, you’re unlikely to reach more than a small amount of your page fans organically, and you’ll reach people who are most likely to like or comment on your page through the boosted post function.
What does this mean to you? Before choosing to boost posts, you’ll need to consider whether the post that you want to boost, will generate leads or revenues for you if someone only clicks like or comment.
If you want to drive traffic to your website to show a competition or special offer, you’ll be better off using the website traffic objective or website conversion option within the Facebook ads manager. What are boosted posts good for?- Getting likes, comments and shares.
- Increasing engagement – want to get your customer’s and prospects views on something? Ask a question within your boosted post.
- Getting your posts seen by your page fans as we know that the organic reach of your page has reduced over the last few years – NB – read on for who the best people to target are for boosted posts!
- Brand building – want to get your business name, products or services in front of your prospects, but don’t want them to visit your website? Boosted posts work well in this case.
- Promoting on page competitions that don’t need people to go off to a landing page to register their entry to your competition. For example, you might want your customers to help you decide between two different products that you’re considering selling. You could ask them to click like on the one that they like most, and the like could also enter them into a prize draw (a great way of incentivising feedback).
- If you’ve only got a really small Facebook ads budget (the minimum spend is only £1 per day for Facebook boosted posts, however if you use the website clicks objective, this increases to £5 per day)
- When you want to get actual clicks to your website – sure you’ll get SOME clicks from your boosted post if you include a website link, however, if you want people who are more likely to click through to your website to see your posts, you’ll be better off using the website clicks objectives within FB ads manager.
- When you want people to take action on your website – if you want your post to be seen by people who are more likely to buy from your e-commerce site, or sign up to your newsletter, you’ll get better results by using the website conversions objective within FB ads manager as Facebook already know who is more likely to take actions, as they track all user’s usage patterns.
- When you want people to watch videos that you’ve directly uploaded to Facebook on your business page – if you want more video views, you’ll get better results by using the video views objectives within the Facebook ads manager, as Facebook know which users are most likely to watch videos based on their previous usage on Facebook.
- Target your page fans – organic reach is often less than 10% of your entire page fan base. You might actually lose some page likes from this, as people may have forgotten that they’ve liked your page, and they decide that they no longer want to hear from you… but that’s OK, honestly, it is! It’s better to have people on your page who are interested to read your posts, as they’re more likely to do business with you, or like, comment or share your posts!
- Target your prospects – here’s where it gets a bit “muddy” in opinions. Sure, getting your posts in front of a new audience that haven’t seen you or your business before is beneficial, but if they don’t already like your page, once they’ve seen your boosted post, they won’t see anything else from you again – unless they like your page from the boosted post (this does happen, but not a lot of the time), so weigh up whether this will help you meet your business objectives. If your objectives are about increasing brand awareness, this can definitely help.
- Facebook boosted posts are show to people who are most likely to click like, comment on, or share your boosted post within the target audience that you set
- If your objective for your post is to get website clicks, or opt ins to your email list or e-commerce sales – choose either Website Clicks or Website conversion objectives rather than boosted post objective.
- If you want to start your Facebook ads journey on a very small budget (of £1) per day, it’s worth testing and measuring your Facebook boosted posts to see if they generate the objectives that you want.
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