All About Boosting

If you read our blog on algorithms, you are probably working hard on combatting those ever-decreasing engagement rates.

Here's what's happening: Facebook has switched to a pay-to-play model. In other words, Facebook saw a spike in businesses using the platform to promote their own products and services and Facebook wanted to monetize. Now, thanks to Facebook's algorithm, brands can expect only 2% of their followers to see their posts on the platform organically.

Facebook's advertising platform has two main faucets: Facebook Ad Campaigns and Facebook Boosting. Running an ad on Facebook is no easy task. Facebook's advertising platform offers a plethora of objectives to choose from, placements, text, image, and targeting efforts all to mess with. An advertiser's performance in selecting these parameters greatly affects the ad's overall performance.

Committing to learning the ins and outs of putting together a successful Facebook advertising campaign can seem like a daunting task. If you are not ready to take the plunge, ease yourself into the Facebook Ads world with boosting.

What is boosting?

Boosting is a user-friendly option Facebook gives brands to pay to get their content seen by more people in their target demographic. It is basically like running a mini Facebook ad. Facebook boosting is available to all brands who have a Facebook business page. The idea of boosting is that a marketer can allocate a small budget to 'boost' a post on their page to appear in more people's timelines.

How do I boost a post?

The first thing you need to have in order to boost a post on Facebook is a Facebook business manager account. Facebook has a great guide to help you set up your own Facebook business manager, check it out here.

How to boost

Once you have populated your page with consistent, attention-grabbing content, you will start to see Facebook's boosting suggestions. You can now go to your company's Facebook page and you should see a button on your post that looks something like this:

Press that and it will populate with your targeting options. Who is your target audience? You are going to want to create a custom audience in order to explore all of your targeting options.

To create a custom audience, click here:

Targeting

The demographic search parameters that Facebook offers are among the most helpful of the options. This allows you to get into the nitty-gritty of who you would like to target. You can narrow your audience by age or gender, location, relationship status, and even work and education history. While you cannot target by net worth, you are able to target by percentile of household income. Take a look at your ideal client profile, get creative, and get to targeting.

You will also be able to use this saved custom audience in future posts you would like to boost which saves you time!

Reach

This also shows you the reach you of your boosted post. Reach is basically the size of the audience you can expect to see your post. This is determined by your budget, how long the boosted post will run for, and the specific search parameters you have set for your custom audience. Try playing around with these different factors and see how it impacts your expected reach.

Duration and Budget

Facebook will now prompt you to set a budget for your boosted post and also set how long your boost will run. As a rule of thumb, a nice $10 over a few days will get you pretty far in the Facebook boosting world. As always, check out a few different budgets over a few different timelines and see how your reach is affected.

Rules and Regulations

Facebook Ad Policies

Facebook, as a social media platform, has ad policies that even a novice advertiser needs to be aware of before entering the world of boosting. One of the harder policies to get around is the text limit on images Facebook set. Facebook is all about showing organic content as we have seen, so they do everything in their power to keep things looking as organic as possible. This includes Facebook's paid advertising. Keeping this goal in mind, Facebook set a limit on how much text your image can have in a paid post. The general rule is that your image can only contain 20% text.

Pro-tip: Before crafting a post about an important event, appearance, new podcast episode or really anything you want to boost, run your image you plan to use through Facebook's text overlay tool here.

There are plenty of other rules that Facebook lists as no-go's for Facebook boosting. These rules are ever-changing and also can be frustrating. Check out the complete list here.

Benefits of boosting

If you can get around Facebook's frustrating ad policies, boosting is a fantastic way to dip into the world of paid advertising. If you are not convinced yet, here are some of our top reasons you should be boosting

Make up for lower reach

If you are taking a deep dive into the world of social media, you physically cannot ignore the fact that less and less people are seeing your content. Facebook is almost entirely a pay-to-play model and if you are not paying, you should not be playing. Boosting is a way to get your content seen by more people, for minimal advertising dollars.

Reaching your target audience

If you are looking for some way for more people to see your posts that are actually in your target market, boosting is the way to go. Once you get creative with the targeting efforts that are available for boosting, it is a piece of cake to get you content in front of the right eyes.

User-friendly

One of the best things about Facebook boosting is that the platform and process are both super user-friendly. It takes genuine expertise to run a successful Facebook ad campaign, but with boosting, not so much. Once you save that original custom audience, you can come back time and time again, allocate a few dollars to a post and be done boosting it in under two minutes. So easy!

Lower budget

Running an actual Facebook ad campaign takes some cash. On average, we suggest the clients we run ads for, pay $500 a month just in ad budget for Facebook. Compared to the cost of running a successful ad campaign, you can run a successful boosting campaign for a fraction of the cost.

Introduction to analytics

When you boost a post, you are able to view the boosted post in Facebook Ads Manager! This means you are able to see the analytics of who your posts are reaching and how they are responding to the post. You can use this data to tweak the content you may be posting to better serve your audience.

At Hyperchat Social, we are boosting experts! If you would like to find out more about boosting and ad management, you can go to TryHyperchat.com and start Turning Social Into Sales!