Boosting Posts on Facebook: A Financial Advisors Guide

You just spent the past 20 minutes coming up with a clever social media post. You pat yourself on the back, and you just know that this post is going to go a long way. You post it on your social platforms, and as the day passes, you realize that you aren’t getting much engagement. Don’t worry, we’ve all been there.

It’s frustrating to not get the attention you deserve – we get it. You see that your posts are getting buried within feeds, and are not reaching your audience. So what do you do? Today, to get the attention you want on social media, sometimes you need to pay.

Average brands only reach 6% of their fans without using paid advertisement

Neil Patel

What Is Social Media Boosting?

Boosting your social media posts is a marketing tactic that is used to exponentially boost the number of people who see your content. It is very simple, and even just $1 a day can make a tremendous difference. The concept is simple: you pay to have your posts appear as sponsored content in people’s timelines. The more you pay, the more people will see it. Not only can you reach a wider audience, but you can also reach a more targeted audience. For example, you can choose to target your post to only U.S. men in their 30s. Whatever your target audience, you choose who your post gets served to!

Boosting also allows you to create your own budget, so you can pay whatever fits within your budget. Don’t worry, it’s not a blind move: the minimum budget is $1, and you can see the estimated reach depending on the budget and target audience that you entered.

What Type Of Content Should You Boost?

It seems great to think that you can pay to reach thousands of people, but it’s actually not so simple. Only certain posts are worth boosting, and it’s important to know if a post is worth it so that you don’t waste your money. First things first, a post is boost worthy if it contains a strong call-to-action. You want people to go to your website, download a white paper, etc. these call-to-action buttons are absolutely necessary.

A second factor to determine boost worthy posts is authenticity. It is important that your post contains an emotionally provoking image because posts that are text heavy do not perform well. In fact, Facebook doesn’t allow you to boost text-heavy posts. Lastly, another important thing to keep in mind is that you should only boost posts that are already doing well.

Why Boost?

You might brush off the idea of boosting because you don’t think boosting can make that much of a difference. In fact, most of your other posts are doing okay, so why pay? Whether or not you accept it, organic reach is declining. It might look like your getting by right now, but appearing in your audience’s newsfeed is getting harder by the day. Why? There are two primary reasons:

Reason #1: too much content

There is simply way too much content being posted on social media, and newsfeeds are not able to handle all of it. 3.2 billion images are shared each day on social, so it’s becoming so much harder to gain exposure. Amidst all this information sharing, in order to make yours visible, it is important to boost.

Reason #2: Personalized Feeds

Another reason why it’s getting harder for your posts to reach your audience is that social media feeds do not show all shared content. The algorithm works in a way where you are only shown what the algorithm believes you will like. For example, on Facebook, a person might be able to see 1500+ stories each day, but only about 300 are actually shown. 

Trust us, boosting works! You can expand your reach wider than you ever thought! In the example below, paying $20 helped this company get 178 engagements.

How to Boost a Post on Facebook

Boosting is very simple, and just requires a couple clicks! There are only minor differences between boosting on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but the concept is the same. Here we will outline how you can boost posts on Facebook:

Step 1: Choose a post to boost

The first thing you need to do is click the blue Boost Post button in the lower-right corner of the post you want to boost as seen in the picture below:

Step 2: Choose Your Audience

After clicking on boost, you will have the option to target your audience. You have the option of choosing to only target people who like your page, people who like your page and their friends, creating a custom audience, or creating a new audience.

After that, you can further edit your targeted audience by choosing gender, age range, location, etc.

Step 3: Set Your Budget

Remember, the minimum amount you need to spend is $1. How much you want to spend is completely up to you! As you can see in the picture below, the more you spend, the more people you reach.

Step 4: Set Duration

Now its time to decide how long you want to boost your post for. You can choose one day, seven days, or 14 days. In addition, you can choose to run the ad until any date you wish.

Step 5: Boost

After setting all the parameters, its finally time to pay and boost your post! Sit back and relax – it’s time to see how your new boosted post performs.

Now What?

It’s time to check how your boost performed. How do you do that? For Facebook, you will measure the success of your ad differently based on the type of post you boosted.

How to see your results

1. Go to your Facebook Page.
2. Select the Ad Center tab and then select All Ads.
3. Find your ad and select View Results.

Post with an image and/or text

If you boosted a post with an image and/or text, success will be measured by the number of post engagements. This can include things such as reacting to, commenting on or sharing the ad, claiming an offer, viewing a photo or video, or clicking on a link.

Post with a CTA

If you boosted a post with an image and/or text, success will be measured by the number of link clicks.

Video Post

If you boosted a post with a video, success will be measured by the number of times your video played for at least 10 seconds, or for nearly its total length if it’s shorter than 10 seconds.

If you see the results meet or exceed the estimates, you know your boost was a success!