Facebook gives a lot of love to those who pay for it. While posting genuine content that your audience can benefit from is always crucial, adding a little dough behind your posts is becoming increasingly important. Even if you don’t have a big social media marketing budget, just adding a $3 boost can take you a long way.
Simply clicking “boost,” however, isn’t going to make your engagement levels skyrocket. By harnessing Facebook’s audience targeting, you can make sure your content is getting seen by the right people in the right location. Here’s how to make that happen:
Make it relevant
You could spend $100 a day on promoting a post, but if it doesn’t provide value to your customers then it’ll likely show low engagement. So, before you even nail down a budget, make sure you have a few stellar blog posts ready that you know your audience will enjoy reading. If you need help coming up with post ideas, read this.
Know who you’re marketing too
Once you’re ready to boost directly from your business Facebook page, you’ll see a pop-up box where you can specify your audience, budget, duration of boost and payment. The first of these options — your audience — determines who your post will be boosted to.
If you have a target customer for your business (for example, if you own a bridal shop, then you would probably target women of a certain age) then you won’t want to waste your money on your ad appearing to the wrong audience. Luckily, Facebook makes customizing your audience relatively easy. By choosing which gender and ages you want to target, you can ensure your ad gets viewed by the right people.
If you want to start off super easy, you can just target “people who like your page” or “people who like your page and their friends.”
Target the right location
If you choose to boost your post to “people you choose through targeting,” then you can make sure your ad only appears to a specific gender who are between specific ages AND live in a specific area. The trick with location targeting is making sure you “drop a pin” where your target audience lives. This ensures you’re targeting neighborhoods where you know potential customers may live.
A few tricks for better location targeting:
- Try first entering a city that you want to target, then zoom in so you can see smaller areas and target from there.
- Keep your radius small (2-10 miles) so you know specifically where you’re targeting.
- Don’t be afraid to drop a lot of small pins in the same boost.
Learn from your results
Once you’ve successfully boosted a post, make sure to watch your results so you can learn what’s working and what isn’t. Facebook allows you to edit your boosted post’s text anytime during the campaign.
Also, you can see your final results by clicking “view results” after your boost has expired, or selecting “publishing tools” on your Facebook page. Here, you can see how many likes, shares and link clicks your post received. If you’re signed up for email notifications through Facebook, you’ll be notified once your boost concludes, too. For all other boost-related questions, check out what Facebook has to say here.