Facebook have made significant changes to their algorithm over the last couple of years, favouring content from individuals over organisations in an attempt to preserve the platform as a place for friends and family to catch up.
Unfortunately, that means content from brands has taken a back seat and you might have seen this reflected in your organic reach dropping.
While this isn’t great news for comms and marketing folk, you still have a few tools at your disposal to turn things around! One of those is to boost your posts and that’s what we’re going to be looking at in today’s blog.
Read on to find out if Facebook boosting could work for your organisation and how to get started!
What is Facebook boosting?
Boosted posts are a type of paid ad on Facebook that can be a cost-effective way to quickly reach a wider target audience. Organisations have the option to boost posts they’ve already created in order to push that content to specific audiences and ensure it’s given higher priority in their news feed.
You can boost a post to specific segments of your existing page fans, or target a wider audience who don’t necessarily follow your page to reach a new pool of people.
Use cases for Facebook boosting
Targeted promotions:
Facebook boosting can be used to fantastic effect as part of a co-ordinated social media campaign. If you’re looking to encourage people to take an action with your content such as register for your event, book your services, or perhaps download your app then boosting can work really well.
So long as you understand the target audience for the campaign and build a story around the content, you don’t have to leave whether your followers see it up to chance. Simply boost the post to ensure it gets in front of the right people which will increase the chances of them taking action with it.
Do you have an upcoming promotion you could try this with?
Recruitment:
While you might think that Facebook isn’t a natural channel for job posts, there are more people on Facebook than any other network and chances are a decent percentage of those will also be thinking about or actively looking to change job. The advantage of posting a job opportunity on Facebook is that not only are people more likely to tag friends and family in opportunities that might be suitable for them, but you can boost that post to very specific audiences who match your requirements. Because of this your recruitment process is likely to be faster too!
This has had a fantastic impact on how local authorities recruit social workers which are notoriously difficult positions to fill due to a national shortage and the challenging nature of the job. But using Facebook advertising local authorities like Derbyshire County Council have been able to reach out to relevant people who have a genuine interest in social work and make it as easy as possible for them to submit an application, all in a cost-effective way!
You can find out more about this in our guide: New Opportunities for Social Media in Local Government!
Educational campaigns:
Another great use case for Facebook boosting is awareness campaigns. The beauty of boosting is that you can target audiences based on really specific criteria such as location and interests. That means organisations such as local authorities and emergency services can share public health advice and other important updates to relevant audiences without putting off others who it might not be relevant for.
A great example of this is flu jabs – as certain groups of people are more vulnerable it’s important that they know they qualify for free flu jabs and where to get them. Creating targeted boosting campaigns for these people is a great way to ensure increased visibility and drive towards national awareness objectives!
How to boost a Facebook post through SoCrowd
1. Select your post to boost
To get started you need to know what you want to boost. You might have already determined this in your social media strategy, or you might be working more reactively. Either way, there are a couple of things to look out for when considering which of your Facebook posts to boost:
- Does the post have a call to action or focus that helps you to meet one of your social media or business objectives?
- Is the post already performing above average and you want to capitalise on this success with a wider audience?
- Is the post time-sensitive and you just need to get the message out to more people faster?
- Are you running a test with different types of content and want to test engagement with a larger sample audience?
If it ticks any one of these boxes then it’s likely a good candidate for boosting.
2. Click the boost button
In SoCrowd just as in Facebook, it’s as simple as clicking the ‘Boost post’ button on your chosen post to kick start the process.
The only difference is that not everyone automatically has access to boost content in SoCrowd. Instead you can control who can and can’t dip into your advertising budget, meaning you’ve got the opportunity to provide tailored training on Facebook advertising before colleagues beyond the Marketing and Comms teams get involved.
3. Select your target audience
The next step is to define who you want to see this post. For this you can choose from a pre-set list of options in Facebook including people who already like your page and/or their friends. Or alternatively, create a new custom audience by selecting from demographics like age, sex, location, and interests. You can then save these audiences and they will show in SoCrowd as a drop-down option.
Only those who have access to Facebook directly and are able to create custom audiences will be able to set these which helps to maintain consistency. Your colleagues using SoCrowd will then have a pre-defined list to select from as you can see below.
4. Set your budget
Next up it’s time to set your budget for boosting the content. This will largely depend upon how important the content is to your social media objectives and what you anticipate the results to be. Before you start spending larger sums on boosting content, we recommend starting small and testing different audiences with different types of content until you’re more confident that putting a larger investment behind the boost will pay off!
5. Set an end date
Decide how long you want to boost your post for keeping in mind any key dates relating to the content. As you can see, the standard options are 1, 7, and 14 days, or you can enter your own end date. Facebook will then spread the cost of your campaign across those days.
6. Boost it!
Hit that boost button!
7. Review your results
If you’re just getting started with Facebook boosting then you might find it’s a bit of trial and error to see what works for you. But the more you experiment with different audiences and creating different types of content, the quicker you’ll figure out what’s worth boosting.
If you’re using boosting to promote a product or service then make sure it’s delivering returns. Consider how much a link click through to your website or a product/offer page is costing you and what percentage of those web visitors actually make a purchase or booking with you!
That’s our introduction to why boosting posts on Facebook is such a powerful tool, and how you can get started. But as always we’d love to hear from you – have you incorporated boosting into your Facebook strategy, and have you used SoCrowd’s boosting tools? Let us know how you got on @SoCrowd or email marketing@crowdcontrolhq.com!
