How to Successfully Boost Your Facebook Posts

Boosted Facebook posts are surprisingly frowned upon in the world of social media marketing. You see a lot of articles stating that you should stop boosting your Facebook posts immediately, and it has become one of the biggest ‘don’ts’ in Facebook advertising. Controversially, I am a big fan of boosted posts. When executed correctly they can be extremely powerful. As with all social advertising, each different platform, objective, targeting option, etc has a different purpose. If you’re looking to increase engagement, enter the boosted post.

What is a boosted Facebook post?

Anyone that is Admin of a page on Facebook or is logged into a business profile on Instagram will be aware of the shiny blue ‘boost’ at the bottom of your posts. Sometimes you get a message from Facebook, encouraging you to spend money on boosting and reach a million more people. There’s even a fire emoji in there, in case you needed any more encouragement.

Effectively, boosting your post is like a mini advert. You put £50 behind your post and Facebook will push it out to more people. There’s no need for an ad account, or a business manager, or any of the advanced advertising features. You simply click a button, choose your targeting from the pop-up et voila.

The issues that arise from this ever so simple advertising option, is just that. It is ever so simple, to the point of being rudimentary. But it really can be effective.

What type of Facebook posts can (should) you boost?

You can pretty much boost any post on your page, as long as it’s not a cover photo or shared post. That doesn’t, however, mean that you should.

• Boosted posts are great at increasing engagement, so don’t boost a post that will not get engagement. The golden rule of social media: if you wouldn’t engage, why would anyone else?
• Competitions are fantastic for engagement but are not fantastic for boosting. There are very strict competition rules. If you run a competition that requires engagement to enter, e.g. ‘like, share and comment to enter’, Facebook will lower the reach of your ad and mark it with a low-quality score. Avoid boosting competition posts where possible.
• Don’t boost images that contain lots of text. Although not a full-blown Facebook ad, boosted posts must still adhere to the image text rule. If you boost an image that has too much text, your reach is going to be restricted by Facebook.

How should you set up the Facebook boost?

So you’ve decided that your post needs more engagement, and it’s not a competition and it doesn’t contain too much text. Now what? You have two options, however, they both require an Ads Manager. As I mentioned before, the targeting capabilities of the on-page boost manager is too limited.

Option One – Boost the post on the page and then edit in Ads Manager

If you really want to click the boost button, but you also want to use targeting that is a little more complex, this is your best option. If you have an Ads Manager set up already, as soon as you click ‘boost’, that post appears as a campaign, amongst all your actual ads – or dark ads as they’re sometimes called. From here, you can edit your adset to include custom audiences, lookalikes and all the features that you’re familiar with seeing in the interface.

Option Two – Set up the boost as a promoted post in Ads Manager

This option is by far the most effective way of running boosted posts. There’s no difference between a boosted post and a promoted post, aside from the names, but promoted posts are set up entirely in the Ads Manager. You simply launch the campaign as you would when running dark ads, set your objective as engagement, and when it comes to ad level, just select ‘use existing post’.

It really is that simple.

I’m unsure why boosted posts have been given the bad reputation that they have, but if you combine the boost features with the ads manager’s more advanced capabilities, you’re onto an engagement winner.

If you’d like to find out more about boosted posts or contradict me on my love for them, get in touch.