January 07 2018
You've set up your Facebook business page. You're sharing some great content. Now, how can you maximize your organic reach to make sure you're getting eyeballs on your page?
People share 1.3 million pieces of content on Facebook every minute of every day, but there are organic (free or next-to-free) ways to break through the clutter to make sure your audience is seeing your content in their News Feed.
As part of our ongoing series on how to improve your Facebook organic reach, let's talk about Boosted posts.
A boosted post is a post from your Facebook business page that can appear higher up on your audience's News Feed (for a fee). It's shown to people who already like your page.
Sponsored posts, on the other hand, are more like ads—your audience will see the word "Sponsored" on the post. The posts can be "unpublished" (meaning they don't appear on your page) and allow you to choose your target demographic and pay a fee to make potential followers (those who are not currently following your page) aware of your business.
Reasons to have "unpublished" sponsored ads can vary. Perhaps you want to target different audiences with the same ad and you don't want all of those ads appearing on your page.
On an agent panel at the Results Summit, Dale Chumbley described how his followers respond to these different types of ads. "A boosted post says your message is really important, so you want to make sure your audience is seeing it—versus a sponsored post, which is viewed as a commercial. Therefore, make sure you choose wisely on which posts you boost."
Well, that's up to you. (Kinda)
Boosted posts start at $5.00 (ahem... your daily coffee habit).
Essentially, when you select your budget, Facebook will estimate how big of an audience your boosted post is likely to reach. You can then pick a budget you're comfortable with based on these estimates.
If you've spent any time on Facebook–and let's be real, you likely do considering the average person spends 35 minutes a day on Facebook alone—you may have noticed that your Feed has less and less content from business pages and more personal content.
In order for business pages like yours to break through the clutter, you've got to make a conscious effort to get more views. By boosting the content you're already creating, you're guaranteeing a degree of visibility for the posts you think are most important.
Why does this work?
Ready to try it out? Follow these steps:
Create a new post or choose an existing post that you want to boost. It can be a status update, a photo, a video, etc. But, remember: we've learned that video and photo content tends to have higher engagement.
In the bottom right-hand corner of the post, you'll see a blue button that says: "Boost Post." Click on that button for a drop-down menu.
It's important to make sure you're targeting the audience that's best suited for your content. You can select "People who like your page" and "their friends" or you can choose to target specific groups with the "People you choose to target" option. Feel free to play around with this to see what works best.
As we mentioned earlier, Facebook allows you to boost a post for as little as $5.00—but your reach will increase the more you spend. Facebook will show you an estimate of your reach based on the budget you select.
Facebook will walk you through that part right here.
Hit that boost button and your post is officially boosted. Note that Facebook will boost the post for one day. However, if they can't reach the max of your budget in that day, they may extend to the second day—but you'll only pay your indicated budget.
Don't forget to go to the "Insights" section of your Facebook page to see how the post performs.
There is no exact science for what post you should boost, but there are some general best practices you can experiment with to see what works for your audience.
Don't be afraid to test out a few different posts to see what works for you and your audience. Setting up a boosted post takes just a few minutes (and perhaps costs less than your daily coffee habit), so feel free to experiment. You might be surprised at how much you can grow your audience!
This is part four of our series on how to get more attention to your Facebook page. Here are links to the other articles you may have missed:
To view the original article, visit the Realtor.com Results blog.