5 Tips to Get the Most From Your Boosted Post

On both Facebook and Instagram, businesses have the option to boost their posts. Boosted post allow you to turn your organic content into ads. However, the boosted post appears as part of the News Feed as opposed to designated ad areas, such as the right sidebar on Facebook. Paying to have your post boosted will put it high in the News Feed on the respective platform, so there’s a better chance your audience will see the post.

It may be tempting to boost the post and let the rest take care of itself, but not utilizing the posts to the best of your advantage would be foolish. A boosted post can help you get in front of new eyes, but you’ll have to do some extra work if you want to keep those eyes on your brand. Just a few simple tips will help you to get the most out of every dollar you paid for a boosted post.

Turn Post Likes Into Page Likes

So you got someone to like your boosted post? That’s great! It’s always good to know that the posts you are paying for are being seen, but don’t stop there. This initial interest in your brand is a great time to engage with a potential follower and invite them to like your page. Once they follow your brand, they’ll be more likely to see your posts in the future (boosted or not).

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To do so, simply click on the part of the post that shows you the unique users that have engaged with your post. From here, you’ll notice that you can “Invite” anyone who has engaged with your post to like your page. Once you’ve invited them, their name will turn to “Invited” or “Liked” depending on their acceptance of your invite. Unfortunately, this option is only available to pages with under 100,000 fans so use it while you can!

Refine Your Audience

Facebook, and therefore Instagram, has a robust set of business tools that can be utilized to better understand your ad performance and audience as a whole. One particularly useful tool is Facebook Audience Insights. Designed to help marketers better understand their target audience, Audience Insights includes aggregate information about geography, demographics, purchase behavior, and more. This gives you the power to look at trends regarding your current or potential customers across Facebook.

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With all this data, you can then find the best audience for your specific brand. Understanding your audience in this way will allow you to create the best content possible. Once your boosted post displays in front of the right audience, you’re in the best position possible for drawing them to your website or brand profile pages.

Make A Choice

You’ll need to make a decision regarding what is most important to you. For some, you might want to be judged on how many click-throughs your posts are driving. For others, it might be engagement and interactions per post. You’ll need to figure out what is most important to you and your business, then use that to develop a strategy for developing your boosted posts based on those goals.

What’s the difference? Click-through is simply how many times a URL is clicked. This is often presented as the click-through rate (CTR) which is the number of clicks on a link divided by the number of times the link was seen. Typically, CTR is used when discussing ad performance, but since boosted posts are a type of ad it could apply here as well.

Engagement, on the other hand, includes all actions your audience takes on the post. This includes liking, sharing, commenting, viewing photos or videos, and even clicking on a link. Engagement is also what Facebook’s EdgeRank is based off of so higher engagement means more people will see your post.

So, what do you choose? As with most metrics, results may vary. However, it’s generally understood that a more engaged audience is more valuable than a larger one. You’ll also want to think about the goal of the content. If you’re running a boosted post for a sale then clicks may be more important, compared to a quote where engagement is your end goal.

Limit Text

A quick google search can tell you that ads which contain images or video typically outperform text-only ads exponentially. However, that’s not to say that text isn’t unfounded in an ad. If you only posted a picture of your product, your audience would have no idea what it was or where to buy it. So when you’re creating your ad, limit text to 20% or less of the total ad space. This means, the text that is on your actual image should cover 20% or less of the visual landscape. You can then utilize your caption and/or headlines to describe the product, post, or sale more clearly. Making your ad more visually based will give your boosted post optimal reach across your audience.

Quick Tips For Ad Images

1. Choose an image that is relevant to your product or service.
2. Use an image that is bright and eye-catching, even when viewed at a small size.
3. Avoid images with small details or text.
4. Consider color. Facebook’s color scheme is blue and white, running an ad image with similar colors may blend into the background for your audience.
5. Feature a logo to encourage brand recognition over time.
6. Include a value proposition, such as “Free trial,” to grab your audience’s attention.

Know Where To Put Your Money

Unless you have an abundance of extra cash, you’re probably not going to be boosting every single post you publish. So you’ll need to understand which posts to put more budget behind and why. And that’s no easy feat. So before you hit that ‘Boost Post’ button, consider the following:

• Use high quality visual content. When boosting a post, especially to users who might not be familiar with the brand, the image will be the first piece they see. It needs to be eye catching and engaging at the same time so be sure to use a high quality image or video.

• Check your data. In order to determine if a certain post has performed well enough to boost, it is essential to check post results under Insights within Facebook’s Business Manager. Boosting a post that  already has high engagement will probably have a larger impact than boosting a post that’s not performing well on its own. Look at metrics like Reach, Likes and Comment/Shares to gain a better understanding of which posts would benefit from a boost.

Bonus: Increase Your Reach

Although refining your audience is important, you’ll want to be wary of carving down your audience too much. Choose your target audience wisely to make sure your potential reach is large while still displaying your ads to a relevant audience. You always want to reach the right people at the right time.

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A general guideline can be applied based on your brand’s age. New brands should be using content and posts to build an initial audience. That effort will be more successful with a more specific demographic. Of course, your branding may be relevant to more than one demographic. So you may want to focus on multiple customer segments, but target your message specifically to each specific group. A more established brand, however, will focus on keeping their current audience engaged and interested in their content while expanding and bringing new people into their community. This brand will likely cast a wider net with their messaging and have a little more room to experiment.

No matter how long your brand has been around, as you gain more data from each post, take the time to focus and tweak your message to incorporate what your audience is responding to. Remember, you want to drive up your audience engagement and encourage members of your community to share.