14 Sep Is Boost Post on Facebook Useful for Businesses?

Boost post on Facebook is the lowest hanging fruit of Facebook advertising – you just need to click on the “Boost Post” button below the post you published on your page, select audience and budget and you’re good to go.

I believe most of you have tried boosting post on Facebook before, but is it a useful Facebook advertising method for your business? I’ve said it many times in our boot camp and other events that boost post on Facebook is the least effective Facebook advertising objective IF your goal is to drive specific actions such as website clicks, conversion on your website, etc.

Let me tell you why.

This article contains excerpt from our Ebook – The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising Objectives.

How Facebook Advertising Objectives work?

We need to first understand how Facebook advertising objectives work, which many businesses do not fully understand before they dive into Facebook advertising and result in monies and opportunities lost.

The 13 Facebook advertising objectives are derived from the historical data on how we interact with Facebook over time. Which means, Facebook studies your past activities on Facebook (which is a lot, for my case since 2006, that’s 10 years of data), such as the statuses you posted, photos, videos, comments, pages you liked, places you checked in or being checked in, everything. From all these data Facebook categorizes us into 13 categories “based on action we are most likely to take when we interact with a post on Facebook”.

The key phrase is “based on action we are most likely to take when we interact with a post on Facebook”.

Let me break it down for you.

Take for example a sample target audience of 1,000 people. Based on historical data, Facebook categorizes them into below categories:

• Audience A: 150 more likely to like/comment/share a post
• Audience B: 250 more into clicking website links
• Audience C: 100 more likely to install a mobile app, etc.

So if you boost a post on Facebook, your sponsored post will be shown to the audience A because naturally the “boost post on Facebook” advertising objective is to help you get more likes, comments and share for your post.

So, Is Boost Post On Facebook Useful?

Yes.

I used the word “useless” to this objective IF your goal is to get website clicks or conversion. However this objective is particularly useful, based on our experience, to increase organic reach among your existing fans.

Facebook uses machine learning that takes more than 100,000 factors into determining which content should appear in our news feed. (source) While it is impossible to learn the algorithm, it is commonly known that if a person who liked your page and do not respond to your post over a period of time, your posts will show less in her news feed and eventually, stop showing at all. We call this “lost likes”, where the number of likes doesn’t reflect the real active audience you have for your posts.

Many pages face this problem. What can we do about it? We use boosted posts to activate them.

There are 3 audience targeting options for your boost post:

• People who like your page
• People who like your page and their friends
• Your selected target audience

Which one works better? It depends. If you opt for the first option to boost your post to people who like your page, the reach is always lower compared to those who like your page and their friends, the reach will be higher by multi-fold.

Using Boost Post on Facebook To Increase Organic Reach

In our common practice, we will usually play with the first 2 options. If our strategy is to constantly increase our long term activation of those who like our page, we will use the boosted post to increase the percentage of active fans.

We’re not able to determine the 100,000 factors that makes your news feed, but it is highly possible that those who like your page and engaged with your posts in a certain period of time, will see your posts more often.

For example, we managed to increase the organic reach for a page from 2% to 25% by constantly allocating a small budget to boost post for a period of 3 months. We stopped boosting posts after 3 months and the organic reach was standing at 20%-25%. This kind of strategy mix can be further optimized if you plan your content towards videos or slideshows where you get to further segmentize your audience to those who are more engaged with your content and carve highly targeted campaigns to drive conversion. You can learn more about advanced Facebook advertising strategy formation in our monthly Effective Facebook Marketing Boot Camp.

We will use the second option, which is to boost posts to people who like our page and their friends, when we want to leverage on the social approval effect to drive awareness, usually promotion and product announcements.

This is what I meant by leveraging on social approval effect, where some ads you’ll see your friends’ names before the post, like this:

Not limited to boosted posts, if you use connection targeting in your ads, you’ll be able to get such “social approval” for your ads.

Building Cross-Objective Facebook Advertising Campaign

Now that you should have a better idea on what boost post on Facebook can do, I encourage you to go further to learn about all 13 Facebook advertising objectives from this ebook – it is free for download. We went extra miles to create this guide to help businesses learn the core function of each advertising objective, so that you’re able to optimize your ads dollars spent. I believe it should be useful if you’re planning to go big on Facebook advertising.

How would you use boost post on Facebook moving forward? Share with us in the comments below.