How to Grow Your Reach with Facebook’s Boosted Posts

While you’re putting in the effort to grow your audience on Facebook, there’s one more avenue you can use to reach a broader audience: boost your posts. This is simply a way for you to pay Facebook to show your post to more people.

Isn’t Posting Daily Enough?

This answer depends on what the end goal is for your business. Posting to Facebook and interacting daily will definitely grow your followers, but if you want a quick jumpstart, you can pay to boost a post to reach more people faster.

A client recently boosted a post for a total of $30, and it brought her $212 in sales. It was an easy “set it and forget it” process. She set her budget of $30 and planned a post that led to sales and was very happy with the result. So much so that she is boosting the same post again and working on another post that she hopes will do even better.

Why Should You Boost a Post?

Without a doubt, you’ve noticed changes with the Facebook algorithms, and you’ve probably heard people complaining about those changes. A business page’s organic reach (not paid) has declined quite a bit so you can no longer depend on Facebook algorithms to get your posts seen, even to the people who have liked your page. Instead of taking a passive, “I hope (fingers crossed) you see my posts” stance, you can be proactive and boost your posts to bypass the questionable organic reach of your basic post and be guaranteed that people see what you’re posting.

A boosted post also allows you to target your audience directly, so you are in total control of the demographics (a highly proactive approach). You can set a specific geographic area as the target or a certain age range. If you’ve thought carefully about your target market, this step will be easy for you to complete.

Speaking of control, you are in complete control of how much you spend on your boosted post, as well as how long you want the campaign to run for. You could run your ad campaign for as little as $1 per day (the daily minimum allowed), but when you spend more money each day, you will reach significantly more people.

How to Boosted a Post

First, you can only boost a post from a Business Page. If you don’t have one, that’s okay, now is the time to set up. A business page gives you more options, analytics, and doesn’t require a friend request. If you are running a business, it is a must. 

Step 1: Choose the Post to Boost

This can be an active post, or you can create a brand new post. If you’ve been active with your page, you’ll even see recommendations for which posts would be best to boost. You get to choose which you think will be best, just think about your purpose of the boosted post, then pick the best post for your goal.

Step 2: Define Your Target Audience

If you want to grow your reach now is where you select your demographics, geographic area, and the age range of who you want to reach. You can even create several audiences all with different demographics by clicking the “Create New Audience” link.

Step 3: Choose the Budget and Campaign Duration

How much do you want to spend per day on your campaign? How long do you want the boosted post to run? 

You’ll see Facebook’s estimated reach climb as your budget increases. This is only an estimate, so be sure to make your decision based on what you can actually afford rather than the number of people who might see your boosted post.

Step 4: Setup Payment, Hit the Boost Button and Analyze the Results

Seeing the result of your boost is exciting since Facebook offers easy-to-understand insights for each boosted post. You will see the actual reach as well as how many clicks the post received. From there, you can figure out if you received any sales directly from the boosted post or if you noticed an increase in website traffic or calls during the time. It is crucial to analyze the results in this manner so you can decide if your ad spend was worth it and how you can make your next boosted post even better. 

Facebook has made boosting a post quite simple, so once you go through it the first time, it will be easy to understand. And once you set all the post’s details, you can go about your day while your boosted post works its magic to bring more eyes to your business.

Boosting a post is only the beginning of Facebook’s advertising options, and it’s an excellent place to start to get your feet wet. If you have success with it and want to go to the next level, or you want to create a more robust ad campaign, the sky is the limit.