Boosting Facebook Posts To Create Facebook Ads
If you manage a Facebook page you may have noticed that once in a while you receive a pop-up notification that recommends you boost one of your Facebook page posts that is performing very well. Not all businesses understand how boosting a post works or the value in using social media to engage customers. To show how boosting can work for your business, we decided to have someone for whom social media is not their main position demonstrate.
Instead of having Stephanie Pyrzynski run this test (whom usually runs our social media) Geoffrey took charge, using the April 2016 article and accompanying video on How Long Does Search Engine Optimization Take to Start Working. Below documents how someone new to Facebook boosted posts would try to optimize their boosted Facebook posts. Here was Geoffrey's experience...
Setting Up The Facebook Ad
When one of our posts triggered the Facebook message, I was greeted with a few options to get our ad underway. We can choose a budget, a timeline for our ad to run, and the audience that we can target. For the budget, Facebook suggested a small amount of $15.00 for this post, however, I wanted to ensure that this was not limited by budget, so I kicked this up to $50.00. Facebook also suggested that we run this only for 1 week, but I wanted to see the difference between weeks so I decided to run this for two weeks.
Setting Up The Facebook Audience Targeting
The Facebook audience targeting went more in depth. I found myself facing a great deal of audience options. I could choose age groups, locations, gender, even interests! The lists of interests was very expansive and I found that a person who is not used to this could easily get lost. This is where Facebook's power is - with such a large audience on this platform, marketers can easily target the audience of their client's customers. Since I did not have the time to go through the full list, I made a few selections relevant to the post and hit the "boost" button to start up.
Facebook Promoted Post Test Process
Every day I would check on how the post did for the previous day. We had 9 different items that I was looking for. These items would either be helping the social perception of our brand (Reach, Likes, Shares, Page Likes, Comments), help get additional traffic to our website (Clicks), or help our business' sales goals (Contact Us and Newsletter Sign Ups).
In the results table, I noticed immediately that there was a jump on the first day in the post reach, yet no additional likes and only 1 click to our website. We did see that we had 3 people sign up for our quarterly newsletter. After the 4th day of this Facebook promoted post test, I started seeing the likes on the post increase day over day and it wasn't until the end of the run period that we started getting additional likes to our page. This was where I started seeing a drop off in the day over day increase in reach and I started seeing an increase in the other metrics.
Facebook Promoted Post Test Results Table
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Facebook Fraud
I did notice something odd during the testing period. The three newsletter sign-ups that we received from boosting were fake names and mail addresses. After looking into this and that sudden spike in reach, I feel that some of those post likes were actually fake as well. This looks to be an issue with Facebook itself since anyone can sign up for an account. I was surprised to see that the likes can be fake, but it started to make sense as the clicks were low.
Overall Thoughts On The Facebook Promoted Post Test
If I had used the knowledge and experience of our social media team, I would have seen better results (and we have in our other social media management projects). I did see an increase in the number of page likes by real people, but overall I was surprised by how the reach could easily jump up from boosting the post for just 3 days! This is great for any brand just looking to reach a wider audience. I feel that this test gave me a good look into what business who using social media management for the first time on their own are seeing. You don't know how your Facebook posts or ad campaigns could perform better if you're unfamiliar with the platform.