If you’re just diving into Facebook advertising, it’s pretty easy to get overwhelmed by all of the options available to you. One option that Facebook has made pretty easy to access and set up is Boosted Posts, but are these a good investment for your business? The answer is yes, they can be based on your goals.

What are Facebook Boosted Posts?

When you boost a page post, you’re choosing to make an extra investment to reach an audience beyond just users who have Liked and Follow your page. There have been recent changes to Facebook’s organic newsfeed results, which means it’s more important than ever to ensure that the content you’re posting on your page is relevant and engaging; and you can help expand the reach of your content through boosting your posts.

When Should You Boost a Post?

Now that there are more targeting options available for boosted posts by setting them up in Ads Manager, these can be a viable option.

Here are some instances where boosting a post is a good route:

Limited Time

The reality is, you may not have the time, desire or resources to create a comprehensive Facebook ad strategy. If that’s the case, Facebook offers some decent engagement insights to help you see which of your page posts are doing the best to inform your decision on which ones might be worth the extra investment.

One-off Events 

Events like these often don’t need full-blown campaigns, just some extra reach to get the word out and help increase attendance.

Social Proof 

This has quickly become a buzz word in our industry and for good reason; people are influenced by the actions and opinions of others, so use that to your advantage. If you have a post with good engagement then try boosting it, with a targeted audience approach; chances are pretty high that new users will see that it has lots of comments/likes/shares and they’ll be tempted to engage too.

Preemptive Engagement Insights

If you’ve got a post that already has high engagement then why not leverage it further? It could start out with a better relevance score when it’s boosted, meaning it could get more impressions and better reach than a new, from scratch ad.

What Posts Should You Boost?

For the purposes of this post, I’m assuming you have great Facebook content on your page already, otherwise why invest extra dollars to boost it and expand its reach? A fast and easy tip for choosing which post(s) to boost is to review your posts’ engagement levels. To see this data, just head to your Facebook page, then choose Posts in the lefthand column:

If you choose the arrow on the far right, you can choose a number of engagement metric segmentation options:

The best metric here to look at is the Engagement Rate, which shows the percentage of people who engaged with your post (liked, commented, shared or clicked). If you have a post with a high engagement rate then you can consider boosting it to expand reach.

How Do You Boost a Post?

One way to do this, as seen in the above screenshot, is from the Insights > Posts page. While this is the most convenient way to boost a post if you’re doing so based on engagement analysis, I recommend boosting posts from Ads Manager because you’ll have more audience targeting options available to you.

Once you create your campaign and set up the targeting you want in your ad set, you’ll be taken to this page where you’ll choose Use Existing Post:

From there, you can either click the arrow next to Select a post in the Creative section to see a drop-down of the posts available:

Or you can choose the Enter Post ID link. To find a Post ID, just choose Page Posts from the upper lefthand main menu:

You’ll see the ID column populate if you choose Ad Posts:

Another way you can set these up is by duplicating ads you already have running; then, from the Edit page in the Ads tab choose Use Existing Post and follow the same process as above:

Conclusion

In many cases, a full-on ad strategy is the way to go with Facebook, but there are some cases where a boosted post can drive the results you’re looking for based on your goals and the time you have available. Additionally, now that there are more targeting options available for boosted posts through Ads Manager, there’s really no reason to rule out this strategy completely if it can help to further your individual business goals.

If you like this post, you may like our post How to Boost Instagram Posts as an Agency.

Have you tried Facebook boosted posts? What results have you seen? Let us know in the comments below!