Boosting Facebook Posts, Part 1: When to Boost your Facebook Post

You’ve done it! Your latest Facebook post has met with success and received likes, shares, and comments. Facebook’s algorithm now recognizes this higher-than-normal level of engagement and begins to organically display your post to more and more timelines. When you’ve got a hot post like this on your hands, give it a boost!

Before we develop this idea further of when is the best time to boost a Facebook post, let us first turn to Facebook for an official explanation on the difference between paid and organic views: Organic reach is the total number of unique people who were shown your post through unpaid distribution. Paid reach is the total number of unique people who were shown your post as a result of ads. 

The Value of Boosting 

Organic views, whether gained through social media or search engines, can be difficult to establish in such a competitive environment. In terms of SEO and content marketing, this makes organic views more valuable than paid views. However, don’t discredit paid views. Paying to boost a post is a sure way to get your post seen, and Facebook puts no limit to the amount of money you can spend on boosting if you want your post seen by a large audience. Plus, when boosting a post, there’s always the potential that someone will see it, like it, and share it organically.    

Boosting to a Targeted Audience

Especially for posts about your business, it’s important to make sure that they’re viewed by your target audience, instead of any and every Facebook user. To help you make sure that your posts are seen exclusively by your target audience, Facebook provides you with some very customizable boosting options so you can hone in on specific demographics.

While it’s important to understand that you can boost just about any post and pay to get it seen by everybody, being selective about what you boost will be critical to your Facebook marketing success. Why should you pay money to boost something that doesn’t appeal to the person that’s seeing it? That’s just a waste of your advertising resources. Sure, your post might be seen on thousands of Facebook timelines. But what good is that if your posts are being totally ignored? It’s bad for business if your company is seen as the source of yet another lame social media advertisement. 

Boosting the Right Posts

In order to get the most out of your boosted posts, be sure to only boost posts that are doing well organically. Unless you’re dealing with a time-sensitive issue, giving a post time to naturally generate likes, comments, and shares before boosting it will help to give you an idea of how well it will perform when it comes time to boost it. Think of organic likes and views kind of like a trial run of how successful a boost may be. This way, you can make sure to boost only good posts which have a higher chance for interactions, as well as make your company look good by the quality and relevancy of your post. 

Ultimately, interactions gained by boosting the right posts are more valuable than views because they lead to website traffic and responses to your site’s links and call to actions. 

While boosting posts is a reasonable method of obtaining views, there’s a bit more to it than dropping some cash on a post and watching your number of views skyrocket. For more practical insight on this topic, be on the lookout for the second part of this article in next month’s JoomConnect newsletter, titled, Boosting Facebook Posts, Part 2: Boosting Posts with Images that Meet Facebook’s Guidelines.