How To Boost A Post On Facebook Without Wasting Your Money
Are you planning to boost a post on Facebook?
Well, you need to read this first before hitting that boost button.
Boosting a post is just one of the many tools of Facebook Advertising. Unlike other online paid ads strategies, boosting a post is very easy to do. No need to watch video tutorials or read long guide articles to know how to use it. The Boost Post button is already available on your every post and you just simply click the button, and you are good to go.
This is the very reason why boosting a post is very popular especially with small businesses who are trying to sell their products online. You don’t need to hire an expensive advertising agency or a professional marketer or buy a ridiculous advertising app or software that you won’t use after.
Anyone can boost a post any time and anywhere with just their phones or computers.
Yes, it is that easy.
Facebook made it that way so anyone can market their product in an instant, especially for small and starting businesses.
But the real questions are…
“Is it working for your brand?”
“Are you hitting your goals with it?”
“Were you able to sell your products or get inquiries for your services?”
In the end, it is not how easy the tool can be used, but how it performs and brings you solid and concrete results.
So if you are thinking of boosting a post or have been using it and feel that it is not working for you, here are the tips and strategies that you need to do to make sure you get the most out of using it.
TIP #1 – Build a custom audience before you boost a post (Don’t skip!)
One of the main reasons why many people are not getting the results they want with boost a post is because they SKIP building a custom audience.
You probably skip it because you don’t know how to do it.
But you should not!
With a custom audience, you will get a better result from your boosted post since your post will show on a more targeted audience rather than on a random cold interest-based audience.
But how do you build a custom audience?
There are different ways on how you can build your custom audience. You can use different sources in building it. Some of your sources can be your website, app activity users, your email or phone list, off line activity of your customers, among others.
Creating a custom audience can be a bit technical. So if you are starting with Facebook advertising, you may easily get overwhelmed. However, once you are successful in building your own custom audience, it will greatly help you in succeeding with Facebook advertising.
We will discuss this more on the following blogs to help you how to set up one. But for now, let us have a rundown on how it looks like and how it works.
Here are the different custom audience lists that you can create.
Customer List
If you have a list of emails, phone numbers or Facebook user IDs that you got from selling your product or from inquiries, you can upload this list manually on Facebook using the Custom Audience Sync tool. Facebook will then use this list to match users. For example, you have an email list that you use on your email marketing, and this email list is the same list that you are trying to sell your product to. You can then upload it to Facebook and use this audience when you boost a post.
Website Behavior
If you want to target people who have visited or have taken an action on your website, you can insert a Facebook pixel tracking code on your website. With this, you can create a custom build audience based on your website visitors.
App Activity
You can also create a custom audience based on the actions of people who use your app or game.
Offline Activity
This can be a list of people who interacted with your business in your physical store, over the phone, or any offline channels.
Facebook Engagement
You can create a custom audience based on people who engage with your posts, videos, events, and forms on Facebook and even Instagram.
So again, make sure to create a custom audience first before boosting any posts on your account. This is to ensure that you get the most out of your boost post and to target the right audience.
But for now, since creating a custom audience is too technical for starters, let’s try to create a targeted audience instead.
Once you pick out a post to boost, you will need to select your audience. You can edit your audience based on gender, location and interest. Make sure to filter out these categories based on your buyer’s persona or how your customers look.
For a post published by accounting firm Savvi Accounting and Shared Services, their target market are business owners around Angeles, Mabalacat, and San Fernando. They’ve also indicated the age of the users to be 24 to 65+. They’ve also filtered out the interest of this audience group.
Take time to create your buyer persona so that it will be easy for you to specify the audience you want your boost post to show.
TIP #2 – Select a post with the highest engagement
From your previous posts, select the post you want to boost. If you are not sure what posts to choose, the best practice is to choose the ones that are already performing well from an engagement perspective. With this, you don’t need to test or experiment with the post if it will perform well.
To do that, just go to the Insights page of your Facebook page, and under the Posts tab, you will see the performance of all your posts.
This is an example of a post that has been performing well organically and has been boosted. We will use this as an example in this article.
On the other hand, Facebook will recommend posts that you can consider boosting. This one is one of the regular posts that have been gaining engagement organically.
TIP #3 – Use emoji in creating a post
You may also create a post to boost. In creating a post, try to include and play around with emoji. According to the experiment done by Adspresso, ads with emojis included in the copy have gained a 30% to 40% click-through rate and 20% lower cost-per-conversion than regular posts. Just make sure you don’t overdo it.
Also, create evergreen posts. Changing your posts every now and then can be time-consuming. Why not take your old posts and repurpose them to make them more engaging. And make sure that these posts are not time-bound.
TIPS #4 – Using call-to-action in boosted posts
Your CTA button will depend on the goal you want to achieve with your ad. There are over 14 CTA buttons on Facebook that you can use, but here are some of the most popular:
- Shop Now
- Learn More
- Sign Up
- Book Now
- Download
Using CTA buttons is a great way to increase conversion. However, according to mobilemonkey.com, using CTA can cost you 3 times more? Why? Well, one of the reasons is that using a CTA button will make your post an Ad post instead of a regular post.
So is using CTA buttons good or bad in boosting a post?
It depends.
A rule of thumb in using a CTA button is if your traffic is warm. Warm traffic means that your audience have interacted or engaged with your brand before and they are one step away from converting that is why using a CTA button is a great strategy. A CTA strategy is good if you are using your custom audience list.
On the other hand, if your audience are fresh audience that don’t know your brand or product yet, better skip the CTA. In short, if you are after brand awareness, using CTA will only cost you 3 times more.
TIP #5 – Set your budget to a minimum first
Facebook will set a minimum budget that you can spend on. But it does not mean that you will have to exhaust that. You can also increase your budget. However, with your initial boost, you would want to test first the effectiveness of your post before increasing your budget.
You can set your budget to the minimum spend or a dollar a day. After a day, analyze the result of the post and decide if you want to spend more to reach more people within your chosen custom audience.
For our example post, our set budget a day is 80 that will reach 410 to 1200 people a day within our custom audience. If you want to reach more, just increase the budget you are willing to spend.
TIP #6 – Run your ad for a week
For an initial boost a post strategy, the best practice is to run the campaign for 7 days. With this length, you will be able to gather enough data on your post. And if your metrics are showing good results, you may then consider running your ad campaign for up to one month.
The minimum days that Facebook will allow you to run your ad is 4 days. That is the minimum days that you can gauge the result of your boosted post.
On the other hand, if within those 4 or 7 days, you are seeing a low engagement or negative results on your ad, then it is okay to pause or stop it and try another one.
What is important is that you monitor and track the performance of your ad to make sure you are not wasting your money.
TIP #7 – Preview your post (Don’t skip)
I know it can be really exciting to hit the boost button once you think that you are all set up. But you need to preview your post first. Look out for errors like wrong spelling, CTA, visuals, videos, etc. A misspelled or a wrong visual can ruin your campaign. So make sure to double-check before launching.
You might expect that your post will be published soon. But you need to wait a couple of minutes or a day for it to be published. Once you hit the boost button, your ad will go first to Facebook’s ad review queue. Assuming it passed Facebook ad policies, that is the time that it will begin to run. You will get an email about this.
TIP #8 – Don’t make your boosted post looks like ads
Facebook ads that don’t look like ads are the ones that perform well. Maybe because people are still conscious of the fact that you are trying to sell and push your products to them when all they want is to scroll on Facebook.
Also, we all know what ads look like. People usually ignore them. However, if they keep on getting the same pushy ad on their feed, they might give you negative feedback by reporting, or tagging your post as spam. They can also hide your posts.
And if this happens, it signals Facebook to penalise you organically as well as in your advertising.
So better to be creative when creating your post.
TIP #9 – Find the best time to boost a post
Knowing what day and time your audience is online can help you have a better performance on your boosted post.
If you want to know when your audience is active on Facebook, you can run some experiments. You can post content on different time and day and see on your Insights dashboard which time and day gathered the most reach and engagement.
The best time and day to post on Facebook will vary depending on the type of business that you have since you have your own set of target markets.
But if you want to know the standard day and time that gets the highest reach and engagement, you may check out the experiment that we did here – Best Time and Day To Post On Facebook.
Wrapping Up
Boost a post strategy may sound and look easy. But if you want to get your money’s worth on this tool, you need to have a plan. Don’t just hit the boost button for the sake of it and expect a good return after. YOU NEED TO PLAN!
Moreover, just like any other forms of online advertisement, YOU NEED TO EXPERIMENT AND TEST – from your content, audience, to time and day of posting. This is to know what will work for your business.
Hopefully, the tips and strategies we listed down here can help you in promoting your business on Facebook. We at Digital Strategists wish you all the best in your business.
If you have questions with regards to social media marketing or digital marketing in general, don’t hesitate to hit the message button below this page.
Happy to help!
More clients for your business,
The Digital Strategists