TL;DR Promote, don’t Boost Facebook posts. Wait, what? What is the difference? Should you ever Boost? Ok, I guess, you have to read the full post.
Facebook is dead. Long live Facebook. On any given day you can find articles promoting Facebook ads and others dismissing the entire social media platform. So what is a publisher to do? I say Promote, don’t Boost. Wait, what? What is the difference? Should you ever Boost?
When to Boost a Facebook Post (clicking the blue button):
Boost a post to FANS ONLY as a way to ensure that people who have said they want to see your content actually see it. The Facebook algorithm for the news feed is filtering out content from pages so if you have 100 followers, only about 4% (4 people) will see any given post. This is really low, and some publishers might only have 1% visibility on their posts. So I’d spend somewhere between $5-25 to boost a post that I really want fans to see. Things like award announcements, events, great publicity, author interviews, and special discounts.
When to Promote a Facebook Post (using ads/manager to promote to NON-FANS):
https://www.facebook.com/ads/manage/powereditor
Clicking the blue Boost button doesn’t let you adequately refine who is going to see the ad. It is a much better use of limited funds to use the ad manager set up so that you can target people based on interests or behaviours and select “People who are not already fans” of the page. I recommend promoting posts that include media reviews, events, awards, contests, or stuff that would be of interest to readers, media, librarians, educators, etc. For example, if a YA publisher posts a new teacher lesson plan, I’d target people who list teacher, librarian or educator as their profession on Facebook. And under “Connections”, I would also select “exclude people who like your page.”
The Timing of Your Promotion Matters
Don’t post then boost, let Facebook accumulate some likes, comments and shares on the post before you boost or promote it. If Facebook captures enough data in advance then they use that to show the post to people with similar attributes so it’s way more effective to wait. General tip: Wait 4 hours before boosting or promoting.
What Works Best?
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Boost or promote content that is relevant for at least 2-4 days. That’s why I suggest award announcements, events, author info, etc.
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Boost or promote posts with links back to your website. The posts that work best when promoted are ones with a call to action (you want people to do something more than just like the post).
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Boost key posts only to existing fans (set a monthly budget for that, start with something modest like $100 a month) as a way to get more engagement and click throughs to your site from Facebook. Then allocate some money, on occasion, to use the ads/manager to promote posts of interest to non-fans. Use those promoted posts as a way to gain more followers for the page.
- Measure success. Before starting, record the number of followers and engagement you have currently and then measure against that to see what kinds of gains you get at various budget thresholds.
