16 Sep 3 Effective Ways to use Facebook Boost Post

Facebook boost post advertising is a powerful tool for your business if used correctly. We will share some proven use cases for your reference in this article.

As the first Facebook advertising objective among the 13, Facebook boost post was the first advertising objective that Facebook made available right on the Facebook Page itself to encourage more businesses to use Facebook advertising.

If you’re new to Facebook advertising, download this free ebook to learn more about the 13 Facebook advertising objectives. Read this article if you’re not sure if Facebook boost post is for you.

Over the years as user behaviour change as well as Facebook’s machine learning and mechanics, many businesses find Facebook boost post advertising is becoming less effective compare to its earlier days.

Based on our experience, the decrease in effectiveness may be caused by the increasingly detailed audience segmentation and categorization with the introduction of more detailed Facebook advertising objectives.

Before we move forward let’s establish a fundamental understanding about Facebook advertising objectives. The 13 Facebook advertising objectives are derived from the historical data on how we interact with Facebook over time.

Facebook categorizes us into 13 different “actions more likely taken by us when we interact with content on Facebook”. You might be more likely to like a post, but I might be more into clicking the link and read further – the way we use Facebook determines our characteristics according the 13 Facebook advertising objectives. Read this ebook where I discussed this topic at length.

Facebook boost post is an advertising objective to help you get more engagements for your posts – engagements are post likes, comments and shares. You can turn your post into different advertising objectives such as website clicks or conversions, while all looks the same outside, they will actually be shown to a slightly different group, albeit within the same audience targeting.

While engagements i.e. likes, comments and shares may not be equivalent to other more direct objectives such as website clicks, conversions or page likes, it is still a powerful advertising objective if we put some thought into it. Let’s take a look at some use cases we’ve applied that created good result for our clients.

Fan Activation Targeting

This is direct, and very useful. If you have been managing a Facebook page since 2010, you probably noticed the organic reach for every post is decreasing. We used to be able to get as high as 30% but recently 3-5% is a norm.

While we’re not able to learn the Facebook news feed algorithm on how we can possibly show more to even those who have liked our page, it is commonly known among Facebook marketers that if a person who liked your page do not engage with your posts for a certain period of time, they will see less of your posts.

What we do is we will plan some posts to be boosted to only those who have liked your page – use fans only promotions, limited time special deal that you know these people would appreciate. With this method we managed to increase the organic reach for a page from 2% to 25% in under 3 months, by constantly allocating a budget to boost post to those who liked the page. Even when we stopped boosting post after 3 months, the effect lasted for another 3 months standing at 20%-25% organic reach.

Using this method allows you to identify those engaged fans – best if you pair your posts with call to actions such as links, etc. to further channel them into your funnel.

Custom Audience Targeting

I believe Facebook Custom Audience is one of the best thing ever created for advertisers. You are able to target those who have visited your website before, on specific pages EXCLUDE specific pages; or those who have watch your video up to 50%; or those who opened your lead form but did not submit.

The combination is almost endless you just have to think deeper.

What we do is we will segmentize users based on different actions taken, we might go further to create Lookalike Audience based on those to expand reach. Here’s some of our frequently used combinations:

• Those who have visited any web pages
• Those who have initiated checkout/payment/completed purchase
• Those who have opened your lead form but didn’t submit

Custom Audience based on website visitors.

The key is instead of advertising to cold audience, you’ll be boosting your post to those who have seen you, interacted with you or even purchased from you before. I call these warm audiencer.

Custom Audience based on existing database.

Another strategy we applied on brands with existing database and worked marvelously is custom audience based on existing database using mobile numbers and emails. By importing your existing database into Facebook you’re able to populate custom audiences based on them, and for some of our clients it generates better click through rate (CTR) than SMS and emails.

Non-Connection Targeting

Sometimes we need to go a little unconventional, given the permission and budget we carried out an experiment with a brand and it worked out beautifully – we boosted post to ONLY friends of those who like the page, EXCLUDING those who liked the page.

With this method we will take full advantage of the social approval of showing their friends’ names before the post as well as the “Like” button on the top right of the post to lure new page likes.

Social Approval by displaying friends’ names before the post.

The advantage of using this method is to get a specific message to a cold audience with certain interrelation with your existing custom audience, even lookalike audience. We usually use this method as one of the top level funnel action such as getting website clicks, page likes, initial brand exposure and more.

Facebook Boost Post with “Like Page” button and “Learn More” CTA button.

It is important to crystalize your funnel, tracking carefully on each and every layer of the funnel on the changes of conversion to ensure we have full control over all vital numbers.

Optimizing Customer Journey

Your customer travels through a journey with a combination of multiple touch points before they convert. Facebook advertising allows us to build multiple call-to-actions with different advertising objectives, hence having full understanding over the 13 Facebook advertising objectives is important to be able to optimize them for your business goals.

Now your turn. Any successful use cases of Facebook boost post to share? Hit the comment button below.