Many businesses are doing it and seeing results such as an increase in post reach and comments and likes on a specific post. But boosting a post on Facebook will waste money on eyeballs of people who simply will not buy from you.
One key to success when advertising online is to be highly targeted. The more targeted you are, the more effective your ads will be and the less money you’ll spend. For the independent and small businesses reading this, I bet you don’t have a big-box budget. Let me help you save some money while increase your Facebook marketing results.
First, I want you to understand why I feel it is crucial to any business’s success to use Facebook advertising to be successful on Facebook in 2014. Sure, there are things you can organically do like consistently post awesome, engaging content; but in order to see results that make a bigger impact, you’ve got to pay.
Last year Facebook announced that on average, only about 3-5% of your fans are organically seeing your posts. That means that if you have 1,000 Likes only about 30-50 of them are organically seeing your Facebook posts, if you are not paying to promote them. Only 3-5%!
This is why Facebook created the Boost button, to help your posts be seen by more people. However, it’s not that targeted. You can see from the graphic below, you can target a post to your fans and their friends, or people who are in a certain age range, live within a certain city or state, and have certain interests.
For a local business, this is targeted however you can get even more targeted. For an eCommerce business, this isn’t very targeted because once you remove the Location component to the boost, this specific example would reach 24 million people, which is WAY too broad of an audience and to reach them all you would need to spend thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
You can see the importance of advertising a post since only 3-5% of likes will organically see them. And since I don’t suggest Boosting, what’s a business owner to do?!
The easiest way is to Promote Posts using the Facebook Ads Manager by going to Facebook.com/ads and clicking ‘Create an Ad’ then select ‘Page Post Engagement’.
After selecting the post you want to promote (you can also promote your most recent post, which automatically promotes posts for you so you don’t always have to go to Facebook.com/ads and set up), you can see from the below image that there are a lot more targeting options than Boosting. In addition to being able to target people who live in a certain state or city, fall in a specific age range and have certain interests, you can also target people who Like other pages (ex: your competitor’s page!), only your current likes (these are your hot leads) or people who don’t like you, yet; and Facebook has even more categories like their Family Status (if they’re a Baby Boomer, Engaged, etc.), if they’re married, job type, political preference and more.
In the above image I entered ‘Wiens Family Cellar’ in the Interests section. That means I would be advertising to the people who like Wiens, which is a winery in Temecula, CA which is where I live. So if I owned a gift store with wine gifts in Temecula, the people who like Wiens that are local would be a great audience for me to get in front of, and is what the above ad example is showing.
Do you see how much more targeted you can get? And how much less you’ll spend? In my opinion, it is completely worth the extra steps to go to Facebook.com/ads to set up versus justing hitting Boost.
You can also use the Power Editor which is a Facebook advertising tool a lot of big brands and agencies use (it’s truly not that difficult to use, you just need to be walked through how to use it). Within Power Editor, you can upload your current email list or advertise to people who have been to your website before – talk about being SUPER TARGETED!!!
If you want to learn how to use Facebook Ads and the Power Editor to increase your Facebook efforts and drive foot and web traffic, I’d like to invite you to join Social Edge, which is a membership site for retailers.
This month’s training in Social Edge is all about Facebook Ads and the Power Editor. For just $47/month you can have access to a program that will truly help you be more successful on Facebook in 2014.
Please note: Monthly members ($47/month) have access to this month’s course only. So if you’d like to participate in the Facebook Ads training, sign up today and go through the training videos by the end of the month. Yearlong members have endless access to the current months’ traffic as well as all past trainings. Yearlong memberships are $475/year.
Learn more and sign up for Social Edge here.
Here’s a look of what’s included in this month’s training:
Video 1: Why Do I Need To Use Facebook Ads?
Video 2: Before You Start Advertising
Video 3: Facebook Ad Types
Video 4: Never Boost a Post
Video 5: Power Editor vs Facebook Ads
Video 6: Facebook Ad Manager Tutorial
Video 7 & 8: Power Editor Tutorial
Video 9: Facebook Ad Best Practices
Video 10: Measuring and Tracking
If you have ran a Facebook Ad and want to share your success or challenges, please do so in a comment below.
This is great info, Crystal. The only thing I would question is the stat about 3-5% of your fans seeing your page posts, and why the boost button was created. I would say it like this:
Facebook limits the number of people you can reach organically through your page to 3-5% on average. They do this so that you can’t reach the rest of them without paying them money to boost your post.
I can’t really blame Facebook for it, but I don’t have to like it. 😉
Hi!
You say “you can also target people who Like other pages (ex: your competitor’s page!)
I can’t see Where this is possible? You can only include people who are connected to you own page, app or event. OR?
Hey Camilla! It’s under ‘interests’. Start typing the name of the page and FB will automatically display it. Just note: you’re not able to advertise to every and all page’s fans, FB only displays some pages. I’ve heard this is because not every fan page is indexed/categorized correctly. Let me know if you have any other q’s, thanks!
After reading this article I decided rather than BOOST a post, that I would use the facebook ads manager method above. I invested $5per day and to run for 24 hours starting at 7pm that evening. By 12pm the next day it had reached over 22,000 people (our posts average 250-1500 in reach). I chose to sent it to just our followers. A large percentage were reached in USA while smaller numbers were reported throughout the world. Which is fine since we are international.
There is sceptasim since interaction such as comments did not increase at all. Likes is only at 23. The post asked 4 questions but the first comment answered each one correctly…so….
I plan to test another type of post today and see how things pan out. I’d like to see more comments and shares for my money…though getting thousands to see the post could and should maybe me my main mission.
I am seeing a nice increase in page LIKES. Up 80% from last week in just one days effort. Thats solid info and a nice accomplishment.
Up 80% in a days efforts, awesome!! With increasing engagement, make sure there’s only one CTA (call to action) and that it’s short and easy to understand what is expected of the fan/viewer to do. You mentioned you asked 4 questions, might be too many? Thanks for sharing your experience!
Why does the Social Edge website say it’s $95month?
Hi Pamela, there was a price increase in May due to the amount of training courses that were added to Social Edge. Please let me know if you have any additional questions, thanks!