Facebook often suggests boosting posts and I often see social media posts and comments from people who have boosted posts and seen no benefit – it has costs money but they’ve had no leads from it.
Boosts have very limited options for targeting – friends and family, and some very generalised targeting options. Under most circumstances boosts are a waste of money. It is highly unlikely that your post will be placed in front of someone who will buy your product or service.
But there is one occasion when boosting a post will achieve the results you want – if you want to get lots of likes and shares on a post and before running it as an ad.
An ad that has a lot of likes and shares will get better results – it is providing the social proof to potential purchases, giving your brand extra credibility.
You need to really think what your final aim is and create a post on your page specifically to run at a later date as an ad.
Initially, any post you put out may well get a few organic likes and comments. By spending a relatively small budget (say £10 ) on a boost (to family and friends of friends) the algorithm then kicks in and boosts your post to the people most likely to engage.
This will ensure that your post has a much healthier engagement when you use the exact same post as a targeted ad. Laser targeted to your ideal client, not only will your post be in front of the eyeballs that matter , but the ad will also have more engagement that will act as social proof.
It’s really important that you use the same post ID, and that you write the initial post as you want it to go out as the ad as you won’t be able to amend it afterwards.
You may well already have a post on your page that you could do this with as well.
Once you have a little boosted engagement, your next step is to increase the social proof even more by creating an ad with an engagement objective. Send this out to a warm audience, such as website visitors or page engagers.
Once you have aggregated a satisfactory amount of social proof through your engagement ad, you may then choose to run another ad (using the same post ID) with a conversion campaign objective to get in some leads from a cold audience. Your ad will have likes, comments and shares and your brand will have the social proof to instil confidence in potential clients.
I have conducted my own experiment on one of my own posts when I was promoting the launch of my Facebook ads strategy service. Initially the post had a handful of likes and shares.
After a £7.72 spend on boosting my ad, I had accumulated a reach of 1.9k with 73 engagements on the mobile news feed and Instagram.
I then ran an ad very briefly (only for a few days as this was just an experiment) to an audience of website visitors (and a lookalike audience) with a spend of £10 and another 73 engagements.
I stopped my experiment there, but I can see that the potential was starting.
A total of 2450 people reached. 88 engagements. A total of £17.72 spent.
A post that had some credibility to then share to a cold audience. (I should ad that I didn’t conduct the second part of the experiment and run the ad to a cold audience as it wasn’t linking out to my lead generarating page)
Although this was a failry low scale and low budget experiment I think it shows that you can buy engagement within your warm audience and if needed, build the social proof to give your brand credibility to a cold audience. If you’re interested in seeing how a Facebook strategist could level up your business using Facebook ads, then get in touch.
