- How do you boost a Facebook post?
In this Facebook boosting tutorial,
I'll show you the exact steps to go through
on how to do it.
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My name is Jerry Potter
and we're gonna show you all about
how to boost a post on Facebook in this video,
and I'm starting here on a Facebook business page.
So from the post that you want to boost,
go ahead and hit Boost Post underneath,
and if for some reason, you don't see the Boost Post button
or it says boost unavailable,
that's 'cause there's just certain things you can't boost.
For example, you can't boost a scheduled Facebook Live
before the Live actually happens.
You can't boost a Facebook cover photo.
But most posts, you should be able to boost.
Open it up, and the first decision you're gonna have to make
is what is your objective,
and this is really where Facebook ads
are smarter than so many other things.
And by the way, when you boost a post,
you're basically turning it into a Facebook ad,
even though you're not using
the big, robust Facebook Ads Manager.
So what the objective is, is what you want to happen
with this post when they show it to more people,
and Facebook wants to show it to people
that wanna do the thing you want them to do,
if that makes sense.
So for example, this is a link post,
so this post was linked to an article,
so the default is gonna be send people to your website.
They're assuming that this is my website.
It's not, but in any case, let's say it's your website,
and so they're saying,
do you wanna optimize for link clicks?
In this case, they would show it to people
that they know regularly click on links.
If instead you want engagement, you would choose this one,
and it would show it to people that like to react to posts,
comment on posts, and share posts.
And if you wanted to get messages,
so let's say this was specifically a post where
I was hoping to get a lot of direct messages from it,
then I would click connect and chat with potential customers
as my objective,
and you'll notice down here on the post preview,
the button has been changed to Send Message.
And so they're gonna show it to people
that are more likely to send a message on Facebook
because they do it all the time.
So really be honest with Facebook
when you click through these,
on which one makes the most sense for your goal
for this post.
Now, I pulled up one other post here,
and this one is actually a video.
It's not a long video, but it's a video,
so you'll notice I have a different objective here,
and video views can be the objective that I'm going for.
So if your goal is to get people to watch your video,
then you might use the video views objective.
You can see the Message button is also still here.
Website Clicks obviously isn't,
because there is no website link here.
Next you're gonna choose your button,
so you can see that the Send Message button
is still down here right now,
but you can actually have this button be whatever you want.
You could have it be Shop Now, Book Now, Learn More,
Sign Up, Directions, Send WhatsAp Message.
So I can change it to Shop Now,
and you'll see now it says Shop Now.
So decide whatever button you want it to be there,
or you can have no button,
if you want this to look a little bit cleaner.
Next up is the special ad category,
and if you are offering housing,
like you're a real estate agent,
or employment, or ads for credit,
you have to basically be very vague in your targeting.
The reason for this is because a lot of these industries
that are highly regulated by the government,
for example, with housing here in the United States,
there are the Fair Housing laws,
housing basically has to be advertised to everybody.
You can't go out of your way to avoid certain neighborhoods,
certain religions, certain genders, income brackets,
anything like that.
So if you fall into one of these categories,
you have to turn that on
and basically choose from the drop-down here,
and it will remove whatever you had in mind
for your targeting,
because you just have to target basically everybody
in a certain area, 18 to 65.
If you don't fall into this category, though,
you can just leave that off.
In this next section, you're gonna choose your audience,
and this is where things get really cool with Facebook,
because you can really target who you're looking for,
again, assuming you're not in
one of those special ad categories.
So to start, the default here when I just logged in says,
"People you choose through targeting,"
and it's basically giving me adults 18 and over
in the state that I'm in, here in Washington.
But I can go in and I can edit this
and I can decide who I want to target.
So first thing, you can target men, women, or both,
and you can choose an age range,
so let's say my product mostly appeals to
25 to 54-year-old women.
And I would go ahead and put that age range in there.
And then right now,
it's targeting the entire state of Washington,
which happens to be where I am recording this tutorial,
but you can X out of that.
It'll probably show your local area.
And then you can put in whatever area you want.
So I live in the city of Seattle.
I could put in Seattle,
and by default, it's gonna drop a pin, as they call it,
at the center of Seattle,
and then you can see here it says 25 miles.
It's basically a 25-mile radius around Seattle.
Well, that is a big area,
so if I'm a local business,
I do not wanna target people that are living way over here
where you have to, you know,
practically take a ferry to get there,
if I'm, let's say, a local coffee shop,
or in the case of this page, a local computer repair shop.
So I can click this drop-down arrow here,
and I can move the radius to be smaller down to 10 miles.
So now this is much, much better.
I don't think most people are gonna drive more than 10 miles
to get their computer fixed at this fictional computer shop.
Now, if you wanna get even more specific than that,
though, you can.
You can X out of that, and I can actually go in
and type specific zip codes.
So now, there's just the zip code in downtown Seattle.
I can add another one.
Whoops, that's Lithuanian.
That is not in downtown Seattle.
So some zip codes, good thing to have here.
Some zip codes do appear in more than one place in the world
so when you type it, you wanna make sure
you're choosing the right one.
So Lithuania came up first, but I want the one in Seattle.
So essentially, it shows those three zip codes
that I put in,
and now I'm targeting these three areas here.
So you can get really, really tight like that,
or you can even put it in an address.
So this is the address of the baseball stadium
that the Seattle Mariners play at,
and so you notice I put that in.
It's dropped that pin, which is already in downtown Seattle,
so it's pretty close to where we were,
but I can also, now that I've done that,
instead of having a 10-mile radius,
I can go down to a one-mile radius
if I wanted to target people near the game.
So that's a little bit about how to do locations.
As you go down here, you'll see at the bottom,
they will tell you how your audience size looks.
It'll tell you about the potential audience size,
depending on how much you spend
and how long you may boost your post,
but the audience that I've chosen right now
is about 49,000 people.
You can see this little gauge here will kind of tell you
specific versus broad,
and a lot of times, people ask, where should that be?
Well, a lot of studies have shown that,
when you go a little more broad,
you actually do better.
Your ads perform better
because they get in front of the right people.
So ideally, you are having it somewhere in the green,
at least, so that Facebook can do a good job
of reaching the people that you want to reach.
Basically by giving them a little more to work with,
they're more likely to find the ones
that are gonna do whatever you want them to do,
when we look at the objectives.
All right, and then the last part here is
this is where you can choose demographics,
interests, or behaviors.
So let me just pick at random, since we're in Seattle,
and we're known for our coffee, let me put in coffee.
And I want you to notice something.
So here's coffee as an interest,
and then you also have these coffees that are job titles.
You have a specific coffee company here, as an employer,
so if a company is big enough,
you can actually target people by their employees.
So you just scroll down, you'll see job titles, interests,
there's different things like that.
You'll get more specific.
Coffee roaster, coffee houses, coffee taster as a job title.
So those are all the different kind of things
that you could do.
So start to put in kind of what you're looking for,
and then it will give you everything else that's down there.
So let's go ahead and just add coffee as an interest.
Okay, so now our audience went from 49,000 to 27,000,
so it got a little smaller,
and it's gonna think people are interested in coffee
because they engage in pages that are about coffee,
or posts if they're about coffee,
or they've liked pages that are about coffee.
Now that I've got coffee here,
I can actually hit Suggestions
and it will bring up a bunch of specific suggestions
that I can use to target beyond that.
So that's kind of a way to start it,
is you can start with one word or phrase
and then just ask for suggestions.
And then the last way that you can kind of do this section
is to hit Browse, and then under Browse here,
I can click on Demographics,
and you can see there's educational level, fields of study,
financial, life events.
So here's somebody who lives away from their family,
somebody who lives away from their hometown, anniversaries.
Under birthday, their birthday month,
their upcoming birthday.
Now, from a consumer standpoint,
it's kinda creepy that all this information is in here.
Newly engaged for a year, newly engaged for three months,
newly engaged for six months,
'cause everybody puts their status on Facebook, right?
Then you can also browse interests
all kinds of different ways, and also behaviors.
So the way this works is somebody only has to be a member
of one of the things that you chose.
So let me drop a few categories in here.
So I've got three coffee categories and ballet.
Maybe I have a special coffee for ballet dangers,
(laughs) just randomly.
Well, in this case, it's gonna show this to people
that are interested in any one of these four things,
so it's not a combination of everything.
If they're interested in any of these,
then they will show it to them.
However, let's say you did wanna
only target people into coffee
and that liked ballet or were ballet dancers.
Then you would come down here and you would say,
narrow audience.
It says and must also match.
Then I can type in ballet dancer.
So now I've got people into coffee
that are also ballet dancers.
You can see our audience size went down
to about 3000 people.
And then in addition to narrowing,
you can also exclude people,
so you could say I want people who love coffee,
but I don't want people who work for Starbucks,
or here's Starbucks as an employer, to see this.
So then it would try and exclude it
from anybody who lists their employer as Starbucks.
It's not perfect.
You're not gonna hide something from everybody
who works at Starbucks,
let's say, if you were saying something negative about 'em,
but that's kind of the way it works.
Once you've got everything the way that you want it,
you go ahead and hit save.
Your audience is now all set.
Now, I just jumped over to a Boost box on my own page,
'cause I wanted to show you, you may have more options.
That tutorial page I used
doesn't have very many likes on it.
You can target people who like your page,
and since the reach for an average Facebook business page
is only 1%,
you've got 1,000 people that like your page
and they're all the people you want to advertise for,
you could spend a couple of bucks
and actually get more of them to see it,
than the 10 who might see it organically.
You can also do this,
people who like your page and their friends,
and in that specific scenario,
if you've ever seen an ad come up in your feed
and it shows three friends that also like it,
that's kinda cool,
because now it's showing your brand to people,
as well as sort of a recommendation
from somebody that they know.
So back to our original post, once your audience is all set,
next up is automatic placements.
Facebook will recommend this because, in theory,
the more people they can show it to,
the better job they can do trying to reach your objective.
I suggest turning this off and at least looking at
where they're gonna show it.
So for example, right now they're saying,
we're gonna show it on Facebook
and we're gonna show it on Instagram.
This does not show as an Instagram post.
It's showing your Facebook post on Instagram,
and if that's what you want, great.
But make sure to come up here and click this preview
and choose Instagram and see how it looks.
Now, in this specific case, this is a link post
and so it won't actually show on Instagram.
There's something wrong with it.
But look and see how it posts,
because things look differently on Instagram
than they do on Facebook.
For starters, the caption is on top on Facebook,
and it's at the bottom on Instagram.
So if you're gonna leave that box checked,
just make sure it looks okay.
I'm gonna go ahead and turn it off.
Then you choose, how long do you want it to run?
In Facebook Ads Manager,
you can get down to minutiae like hours.
Here you have to do full days,
but you could always turn it off earlier, if you wanted to.
So five days, we've got a budget of $10.
So it shows it's gonna run here
for five days, through there.
And it's gonna tell you the estimate
of how many people they think that you will reach for that.
You can increase your budget or decrease your budget.
The minimum budget, by the way, is only $1 per day.
So you can see, I say I wanna advertise one day for $1.
Now, you may not reach many people for that,
but you can certainly play around with it at that level.
Now, watch, if I tell it to go to five days,
now it's saying you need at least $5.
So now we have to come down here and type in $5.
And at the bottom, if you've never set this up before,
you'll have to set up a payment method,
so that you can pay for your boost.
On the right, as I showed you a second ago,
you can see how it looks.
Most people will probably see it on mobile,
so I would strongly suggest
clicking in mobile news feed view,
so you can see how it looks.
Then when you're all done, hit Boost, and you're all set.
Now, if you wanna know a little more about
which Facebook posts are worth boosting,
I explain that in a tutorial that's linked up
on the screen right now,
or in the description of this video.
Thank you so much for watching.
You're not only supporting me,
but also my two tiny superheroes at home.
I will see you in the next video.