Boosting on Facebook
Targeting
Location – Unless your target market is outside of one of the main industri-alized countries, the rule of thumb is to not boost posts there. There are exceptions to this rule. For example, the Golden State Warriors have a strong Filipino audience (Manny Pacquiao has come to play, Filipino Heritage night, Filipino jerseys), so boosting “unicorn” (i.e., extremely well-
performing) posts to a worldwide audience is smart because there is enough overlap to justify reaching some folks who aren’t necessarily buying tickets or merchandise.
When boosting any location-specific events or promotions, target by city. Select a range outside of that city (up to 50 mi.). If you’re trying to target by county, you’ll notice that Facebook’s location targeting doesn’t have an option for this. Oftentimes, unlisted locations will have pages, so in this example, we’ll target fans of Orange County. It’s expected that a majority of fans will be residents.
While it’s okay to boost to worldwide for engagement, when we drive people into Messenger or landing pages, let’s select only from pre-made audiences that have just US, CA, UK, IE, ZA, AU, and NZ for countries.
The more accurate alternative for targeting an unlisted location (since it’s not guaranteed that all fans of the city page are current residents) is to target locations making up the area and expanding the radiuses as needed.
Age and Demographics
There’s no need to pick an age range because CPM will take care of it. The same goes for targeting by gender. Facebook will automatically put your content in front of the demographics that will connect best with said content. Let the system optimize for you.
The “worldwide” county target will give you crazy good engagement rates and cost per engagement– up to 10 likes per penny in some cases.
To enable it, you have to choose it in Ads Manager since it’s not available when creating/editing audiences from boosting posts.
The downside is that most of your traffic comes from India and Bangladesh. Check out the screenshot to see what you’ll normally get.
To overcome this, target by worldwide + another target, such as fans of Digital Marketer (in my example here). Then, after you build up 10,000 likes, switch the targeting to the sister audience that is exactly the same but, now, just the United States (or whatever country you want to hit).
If you practice this technique, you’ll build social proof via boosted posts by having audiences in pairs– identical, except that one has the worldwide targeting to get it going.
And, if you use video, you’ll build remarketing audiences at the same time, so you can show a sequential piece of content to anyone who watched your video.
Workplace and Interest Targeting
This is the best part of Facebook ads. Facebook allows you to target up to 1,000 items, so go crazy having a single “mega” audience of all of them and some smaller audiences you’ll reuse by topic.
We like to have ones for media and ones for vertical influencers (people who work at related companies, partners, customers, etc.).
All it takes is $1/day to increase your content’s reach by influencing the influencers. Assume this is about 200-300 people per day. If Facebook’s estimator says it’s under 1,000 people, don’t worry about it.
Saved Audiences
Using Facebook’s Ads Manager, create saved audiences that you can promote to on a regular basis. This will save you time by allowing you to simply hit “Boost”, select an audience, and set a budget.
Here are 3 steps to make your own:
- Click the dropdown menu in the top-left corner of Ads Manager.
- Under the “Saved Audience” heading, find “Create a Saved Audience”
- Click “Save This Audience”
Amplification
Here’s what you should know before you publish and hit “Boost”.
Text to Image Ratio
See if your content passes the 20% text ratio. Facebook previously limited text on ad images to a strict 20% to maintain an “enjoyable consumer experience”, as they put it. If an ad had 20% or more text in the image, it wouldn’t be approved.
They’ve since shifted policy to accommodate text while maintaining that minimal text is the preferred image style. The more text on the creative (including logos, watermarks, and numbers), the lower the reach and the higher the cost. Beware of this since Facebook might charge you more to serve your ad less.
Boosting Cover Photos
Many people will put their highest authority photos as their cover photos, but then they’re not able to boost these from the page. However, if you pull the Post ID, you can still get them to run by setting it up in Ads Manager.
When to Boost Posts
If content is immediately relevant and time-sensitive (e.g., SpaceX landed Earth’s first humans on Mars), it should be boosted directly after posting before losing relevance.
Certain posts with short-term relevance, like news, will only have a 24-hour window to create value. After this, stop boosting and move on to the next piece of content.
That being said, boosted content may exist concurrently but should target slightly different audiences.
For non-urgent posts, wait. If you boost too early, you run the risk of cannibalizing your impressions and not giving enough time to see winners emerge. You’d be paying for impressions that you would’ve had organically.
If you boost after 2-3 hours, you lose relevance– especially if you have a big page (more than 100,000 impressions a day).
While timing and duration are important, if you’re not boosting at the right point in your conversion funnel, these other strategic points won’t be effective.