How to ‘Boost’ Facebook Posts Successfully in 2021
A step-by-step guide to advertising your content on Facebook
Boosting content on Facebook can be a great way to grow your audience and expand the reach of your posts. For new businesses, boosting content on Facebook can be essential to the overall growth of your online brand and presence. However, while advertising posts on Facebook is an essential skill for any digital marketer, it’s no easy feat.
It’s true - Facebook’s advertising structure is convoluted, inconsistent and hard to grasp for newcomers. In many cases, checking the wrong box when posting your advertisement is enough for your ad to be declined altogether; Facebook is surprisingly strict with the logistics of its users' boosted posts.
Despite the overall importance of boosting posts on Facebook, the steep learning curve associated with advertising your content online is enough to dissuade many businesses from even trying.
If you currently find yourself in this position - don’t worry. Here’s a step-by-step guide to boosting your posts on Facebook successfully:
1. Pick the Right Content to Boost
When boosting posts on Facebook, it’s important to create content that would be interesting to a stranger, or at the very least, someone interested in your industry. Advertising personal content, things like selfies or photos of your family, is not recommended. This may sound obvious, but you’d be surprised by the types of posts that are boosted on Facebook - in many cases, new businesses simply just don’t have professional content to advertise. If you find yourself in this position, boosting posts on Facebook might not be right for your business yet - create content that’s worth your dollar first.
2. Choose the Goal of your Advertisement
In simple terms, advertising content on Facebook can help grow the reach of your online audience. However, when users begin the process of boosting a particular post, Facebook asks its users to define their advertising goal in a more detailed manner. Maybe you’re a take-out restaurant looking for more calls? You can set that as the official ‘goal’ of your advertisement, and Facebook will place a ‘Call Now’ button below your boosted post. There are plenty of more options, too. Want to engage in more conversations with your audience? You can set that as your goal and your post will recieve a ‘Message Me’ button. Choosing the goal of your advertisement is the most important step of boosting posts on Facebook; the goal of your boosted post shapes the structure of your advertisement itself.
3. Watch Out for Special Ad Categories
For many businesses, the special ad categories are completely inconsequential. However, a few select industries have to be careful with how they advertise their content on Facebook. For legal purposes, boosted posts pertaining to credit, employment, housing, social issues and/or politics have to be checked. Failure to do so will result in Facebook declining your ad all together. The social media platform doesn’t let you be ambiguous either - posts pertaining to real estate will be denied if you don’t mark them as housing advertisements.
4. Design your Audience
When boosting posts on Facebook, you can essentially construct the audience your advertisement will reach before it’s even posted. Basically, Facebook allows its users to target specific demographics when boosting their posts. Say you’re a pharmaceutical company advertising a new medication for the elderly - with the click of a few buttons, you can boost a post that will only be seen by users over the age of 65. Other than age, Facebook allows businesses to target specific consumer audiences based on demographics such as location, gender and even general interests.
5. Set your Budget
While Facebook is a social media platform at face value, it is more accurately a business; boosting your posts on Facebook comes at a cost. How much a business decides to spend on a boosted post is entirely up to their own discretion - an advertisement boosted for $10 can be just as valuable to a small business as a $1,000 advertisement boosted by a large corporation. At the end of the day, your business is going to receive the engagement and reach that you ultimately pay for.