By now we’re all on social media, right? If not, get yourself over to this blog here to see why you should be! While we wait for those few late-comers to get their profile set up, I want to chat to you social media veterans about boosts and sponsored posts.

We all maintain and post to our business pages on social media with varying degrees of success. Some of us only gain small amounts of traffic for our efforts on social media, while others seem to have the midas touch and gain new followers every time they post. No matter what return you’ve seen with social media, content is king and producing high quality content is the best way to get your followers to engage. For the most part that is…

When you log on to your business page I’m sure you’ve all seen the numbers under each post? Along with the normal likes and shares, you can see the post reach. This tells you exactly how many people have seen your post. Typically, this number will be way lower than your follower count (unless you have a viral piece of content on your hands, in that case congratulations!) but why is that? Why isn’t everyone seeing your updates?

Facebook’s algorithm, unlike the good old days, doesn’t just show everyone everything they’ve subscribed to. What it does instead is cherry-picks content that it thinks you will want to see based on your likes, how you browse and how popular the content is. This is great for users as a lot of noise gets cut out of their feed and they only see things they care about. For you however, this can cause somewhat of a problem.

Because of Facebook’s algorithm, your organic reach to your followers sits at about 6% of total page likes (that figure changes a little if you have over 500k followers and if you’re a local agent with that sort of following, please let us know your secret). 6% is a tiny amount of your followers that actually get to see your posts and content, but what can be done about it? Well, this is where boosting comes in.

Post boosting is the paid advertising side of Facebook. Before I scare you off with yet another thing to pay for, let me give you some of our stats.

We recently worked with one of our clients on boosting their Facebook posts and the numbers we saw were frankly incredible. In terms of reach, the people seeing their posts raised by nearly 1,200%! With all that extra exposure, their page engagement rose by 400% and they received 200% more page likes. This is, quite frankly, an incredible growth spurt that we monitored over the course of just a week.

So how many hundreds of pounds did this amazing growth set the agent back? £300? £400? Not exactly. It was actually only £20 for the entire week.

What that £20 bought was not only a week’s worth of added exposure to an existing audience but also allowed our agent to target new followers and potential new business based on their interests, opening up new opportunities. For example, does a user like your competitor? You can target them. Do they like local events? You can target them too. You can even target down to an exact radius of your branch so that none of your additional exposure is wasted on someone who has no need for your services.

We asked if our client could provide a quick word on their experience with boosting and Katherine had this to say:

"At Rockett Home Rentals we tend to focus on paper advertising such as postcards and fliers but recently we have diverted our efforts towards social media to see what benefits it can bring. We’ve explored both ‘Promoting’ our page and ‘Boosting’ our posts to see which gets the best results and so far we think the ‘Boost’ option works well for us. We’ve seen the number of likes increase by around 100 in just over a month and the interaction on our posts has improved greatly."

Now as great as the targeting tools are, they won’t do much if your actual post doesn’t grab a user’s attention! You need to make sure that your post is relevant to your selected audience, imagery is contextual to the post and that you give the viewers a reason to click. Without these simple points, sure you’ll get more people seeing your posts but you won’t see any growth where it really matters: people who click, like, share and comment.

We also asked Lucie of Wishart Estate Agents to talk about her experience with boosting and she had this to say:

"Given Facebook doesn’t share everything we post with everyone who likes our page, we’re always looking for improved ways to increase our brand exposure within our local area and also reach out to potential new clients at the same time. Boosting a post, with our branding and interesting content, entices Facebook users to interact with our page. It also reaches out to those who we may not have directly targeted in the past, like that friend of our client, who was reliably informed over dinner that we’re the best thing since sliced bread, or that potential new client who has spotted our gorgeous for sale flags, but as a new company, doesn’t really know who we are our what we are about. Once they’re on our Facebook page, they get so much more info about us, much more than for sale boards and adverts can provide. One of the main advantages to boosting on Facebook has to be the value for money, such a huge audience, for very little cost, there’s really nothing to lose."

If you’ve got something that you need your audience to see, maybe you’re running a competition, perhaps you’ve done something great for your community, whatever it may be, consider boosting your post. It’s so simple to do and the results we’ve already seen speak for themselves. Just be sure you’re creating great content to go along with it.

If you want to know any more about boosting posts and how you can maximise them for your business, be sure to get in touch!