Facebook Post Boosts: Helping or Hurting Your Brand?

Boosting a Facebook post is one of the simplest and most effective ways to increase your reach. It's also free!

Brand exposure is key when marketing your business.

Every time you post on Facebook, there’s an opportunity to give the spotlight to your brand and gain exposure for it in front of new people that may not be familiar with who you are or what you do just yet. What better way than through a paid promotion? There are tons of different Facebook post boosts out there to choose from, but not all of them are worth your time or money.

Posting daily on social media is great for increasing brand exposure if you’re able to do it consistently and effectively at that; however, when done right, paid advertising can help accelerate the process in giving your brand exposure, and it doesn’t have to cost a fortune.

The key is knowing how to successfully set your Facebook post boosts up for success in order to get the most out of them long-term. For instance, choosing relevant posts with high engagement can be helpful when looking at boosting posts on Instagram or Twitter as well—it’s all about finding what works for you.

When Is The Best Time to Boost a Post?

The short answer is when you want to increase your post's reach. The long answer is it depends on how many people are in the audience of your Facebook page, what types of posts they like (and don't like), and what type of engagement you're hoping for. If this all sounds complicated, that's because boosting a post has the potential to be complicated. But if you want more likes, comments, and shares for your post or page—and who doesn't?—it's worth figuring out how Facebook ads work.

Does boosting a post help or hurt your brand?

Here are some pros and cons for you to consider before making the decision.

• Pros: Boosted posts are a quick, affordable way to increase your business’s exposure on Facebook. Boosting posts can be much more cost effective than advertising on Facebook, giving you access to an audience that may not have seen your content otherwise. The boost will show up in the newsfeeds of people who don't follow you but do follow someone who liked or commented on it, which may introduce them to your page!

• Cons: There's no way for users to tell if a post was boosted or not, so they might think that you're paying for likes. This can be devastating to your credibility and reputation, especially if you hire a third-party service that promises thousands of fake page views or followers. You may end up spending more money on ads than you would have by boosting the post in the first place!

How to Create a Boosted Post

Most importantly: you can only boost a post from a Business Page, so if you don’t have one set up yet, get that done. 

Step 1: Choose which Post to Boost

This is where you’ll see all of the Facebook posts that you’ve created on your page. Scroll through and find a post from within the last 90 days.

Step 2: Choose Your Target Audience

If you want to grow your name recognition, select your own demographics, geographic area, and/or age range. You can even create multiple audiences with different demographics by clicking on the “Create New Audience” link.

Step 3: Choose how much to budget, then review the options you selected for targeting users who will be seeing your ad (i.e., gender, location, language, age range)

Note: If you’re looking for a more targeted audience and/or want to create an ad from scratch instead of boosting a post, Facebook ads manager is the place to go.

Step 4: Select your objective (i.e., engagement rate, website clicks or conversions)

Step 5: Setup Your Payment, Hit the Boost Button, then Analyze the Results

Seeing the results of your boost is exciting because Facebook offers easy-to-understand insights for every boosted post. You will see your actual reach as well as how many clicks your post received. From there you can determine if you received any sales directly from this post or if you noticed an increase in friend requests during this time frame. 

The most important factor in boosting a post is planning out your budget and choosing the specific posts that you want to promote. It may take some time in order to find the best one, but when done correctly it will be worth all of your hard work!

Post Updated 5 February 2019