How to Boost a Facebook Post Effectively

By Deepak Kanakaraju in Digital Marketing — May 31, 2017

Most of the businesses that advertise on Facebook just use the Facebook’s Boost Post feature. For many marketers, the Facebook Ads Manager or the Power Editor feels daunting and overwhelming.

With a simple boost post, one cannot have the right targeting or conversion tracking. Most of such boosted posts yield very poor results, but people keep doing it anyway because it is easy to do it.

In this article, I want to show you a simple, step-by-step way to boost your post in an effective way using a combination of Boost Post and the Ads Manager.

It is recommended that you already have the Facebook Pixel installed on your website. If you do not know about the Facebook Pixel, read this article.

Get the Post Button with a $1 Boost

When you share a link on Facebook, there is no CTA (Call to Action) button on the post. This is referred to as the Post Button by Facebook.

If you Boost the post from your Facebook page for a minimum budget, for 1 day, you will get the CTA button on it. You will not get this button even if you run an ad directly using the ads manager. So I recommend getting this done first.

For blog articles, I use the ‘Learn More’ CTA and for promoting webinars or free courses I use the ‘Sign up’ button. After publishing your post, click on Boost Post on your page.

This will open up a window where you have options to choose the post button, audience, and budget.

You will have 6 different CTA options like Shop Now, Book Now, Learn More, Sign Up and Send Message (for messenger ads). You will also be able to see a preview of how the post button looks like along with your post.

It doesn’t really matter what audience you choose here. The basic option would be people who have liked your page. We will do advanced audience targeting in the later stages via Ads manager. Boosting the post here is just get the post button.

I recommend boosting almost every post on your page with a minimum budget because you will get a Post Button that is otherwise not available. Your page followers and other people who see it via shares will also see the post button. The button is not limited to the audience seeing the post via paid boost. So your overall CTR will increase!

Once you have got the CTA button, there is nothing else to do in here. We will use the Ads Manager to boost it for higher budgets. I also recommend creating ads with this method because you can get a CTA button and combined organic reach with paid ad posts (explained in detail later).

Using the Facebook Ads Manager

You don’t need to use the power editor for this. You can get this done with the ads manager. Go into the Facebook Ads Manager and click on + Create Campaign.

In the next step, you will see a lot of campaign objectives choose from. Select Traffic as the goal if you want to drive more clicks to the link you’ve shared. If you have posted a text or image post and just want to reach more people, choose Engagement or Brand Awareness.

In the next step, you have to select your audience, budget, and devices.

When choosing the audience, you have a LOT more options here than what you get in the Boost Post tool. If you have a large following, you can just choose Engaged People to reach to the most active users of your Page.

If you do not have a huge audience, you can build your audience using the Audience Tab. If you have a Facebook Pixel installed on your website, and if you’ve had some traffic to your website already – you can create Lookalike Audiences inside the Audience section. I will write a separate blog post on Facebook Audiences because it is a deep topic and needs a blog post of its own.

Once you have selected the target audience, then Facebook will ask you to create an Ad. When you create a new Ad, it is just like any other Facebook Post that you make on your page, but the Ad post is hidden from the main feed. Instead of creating an ad, we are going to use an existing post.

In this case, it’s the same post that we are trying to boost.

Once you have selected the existing post, click on Place Order. Your order will be placed and the ad post goes for a review again.

Once the ad is approved (usually gets approved less than 30 minutes), your post will be Boosted to the target audience in the form of an ad.

By boosting posts this way, my click costs have been less than half of other ad campaigns and Boost Post campaigns.

For example, look at the post I boosted recently:

This is the same post mentioned above. Within a few hours, it has got 40 clicks and at less than 2 cents per click. (2 cents is not less in other markets, but in the marketing niche, it is very low!).

You can also see the relevance score is 9. Which means that this post is being only shown to people who are likely to engage with it. Having a good audience targeting reduces the cost because there is less bleed in showing the post to non-interested people.

Benefits of Using Ads Manager to Boost Posts

When you boost posts this way, it is much more effective than a normal Facebook Ad in terms of reach and cost. This is because the post showed organically to the people who have Liked / Followed your page as soon as you post it. There are some likes, shares, and comments on the post even before you start running the ad. When you make a good post into an ad, the ad performs well from the beginning.

I recommend boosting the post one day after posting the link because it would give Facebook enough time to measure the effectiveness of the post and develop an edge rank for it. With this method, you are combining the power of organic reach with ads.

The ad performs better because of quality signals from organic reach and you will get more organic reach because the ad is increasing the momentum of the post.

Using the same method I’ve shared above, I got insane reach for one of my posts on my page. You can see 4k+ shares, 1.8k comments, 150k+ likes and 4+ million people reached!

Let me show you another example.

Recently I made a blog post about the 100-day blogging course. I shared it on my Facebook page. Boosted it from the page to get the Post Button. And then I used ad manager to convert the same post into an ad.

You can see that the ad has got 1480 clicks so far.

And here you can see that the post has got a reach of 59k people, nearly 1k likes and 39 shares. Around 10% of the reach from this post is organic. The organic reach would have been much less if this post was not boosted.

I hope this post helped you understand the best way to Boost your Facebook Posts. Go ahead and try it on one of your posts and let me know how it worked for you.

And make sure you’ve read the other posts on Facebook:

And if you have any questions, leave a comment below.