If you publish great social posts and perform best practices engagement on your business’s social accounts, you will build brand awareness and grow your following—but it’ll be slow.
Luckily, there’s a way to increase visibility and reach more people faster and that’s to boost, promote and sponsor your social posts.
Targeting, objectives and metrics:
With Boosted (Facebook), Promoted (Instagram & Twitter) and Sponsored (LinkedIn) Posts, you can set targeting with near-laser focus, helping to ensure that your content is shown to the right people—your target audience, defined by age, gender, location, interests and more.
You can also boost, promote and sponsor posts based on specific objectives depending on your current business goals and what it is you’re posting, like: increase engagement, drive website traffic and encourage people to get in touch (among lots else).
Finally, paying for reach unlocks access to more detailed performance data than you get on regular, organic social posts so you can better judge what kind of content, budget, timeline, targeting and objective(s) work best to help you grow your brand on social media.
Cool, right? But first…
There are different ways to boost, promote and sponsor content. On Facebook, for example, you can simply click that blue “Boost Post” button beneath a post on your Page. (This is the easiest way to go, and recommended for beginners.)
But you can also create an “ad” for Facebook and/or Instagram from an existing post inside Ads Manager. (Similarly, LinkedIn offers Campaign Manager, and you promote tweets from Twitter’s Tweet Analytics.)
Creating promotions in those places gives access to more targeting and objective options (among other things). And while “figuring out Ads Manager” for example should be on your list of things to do (you’ll be able to create better ads for better results), the learning curve can be steep.
So start simple and give that Facebook Boost Post button a try now!
You’ll need:
- Admin access to your Facebook Business Page
- A great Facebook post you’ve already published
- A credit card and a small “boosted post” budget
- Social Marketer’s free “How To Boost” guide (see below)
Once you’ve experimented with Facebook Boosted Posts, give sponsored content on other networks a try!
Quick Links >>>
- Facebook Boosted Posts: How to boost a Facebook post – “Boosted posts are ads you create from posts on your Page…may help you get more people to react, share and comment on it. You may also reach new people who are interested but don’t currently follow you.”
- Instagram Promoted Posts: How to promote an Instagram post – “The easiest way to run ads is by promoting posts you’ve shared…Just select the post you want to promote, and then track how many people are seeing and interacting with your promoted post by tapping.”
- Twitter Promoted Tweets: How to promote a Tweet – “Promoted Tweets are ordinary Tweets purchased by advertisers who want to reach a wider group of users or spark engagement from their existing followers.”
- LinkedIn Sponsored Posts: How to sponsor an update (post) on LinkedIn – “Target people in a professional mindset with content marketing on LinkedIn. Run native ads across desktop and mobile to build an audience that’s ready to do business with you.”
Understanding Impressions and Reach:
These metrics are important. Sometimes your boosted or promoted post won’t get the number of engagements or clicks you’d hoped for, but it will get thousands of Impressions and people Reached, and those aren’t for nothing! From Facebook:
- Impressions: “The number of times your ads were on screen..”
- Reach: “The number of people who saw your ads at least once.
So if your boosted post’s targeting was on-point, and Reach represents the number of those people who saw it, then you succeeded at delivering your content to the right people. Great brand building!
Important: Boosting, promoting or sponsoring a post won’t guarantee results—it has to be a good post. If it’s badly written, poorly designed, not timely, or not properly targeted, paying to increase reach won’t necessarily help.
And, even then, there will always be variables outside of your control—what your competitors are doing, what’s happening in your industry or in the world, etc. So hedge your bets and boost, promote and sponsor posts that follow all of the recommended best practices.
And test, test, test! You won’t know in the beginning what kind of post with what kind of media on which network with what targeting and what size budget works best. So testing different variables is a great idea, comparing results to boost smarter next time.
Want to add boosted posts to your marketing toolkit but don’t have time to create the posts in the first place?
Social Marketer membership will provide you with pitch-perfect, boost-ready captions and graphics templates you can get online in minutes. Learn more: SocialMarketer.com