By Bill Fletcher
Before I began, read this article carefully. After reading… read it again. I have made many points some will make sense while other will cause to think. If your like me you will also get to the point where you will say…”what” and give up. That will be the worst you can do. Just stop take a deep breath and continue.
Being good at Facebook or great is just a matter of time, trial and errors.
Become a student of Facebook. Why? Because Facebook is always changing. What you learned today maybe different tomorrow. The concept is the same, but the procedures maybe different.
What I normally do when I start something new is to go to Facebook, and follow each step as I read.
Let’s began!
When Do You Boost A Post?
Boosting a post is very easy to do and available for any post on your timeline. All you need to do is click “Boost Post” in the lower right corner of your post.
When you click “Boost Post”, you have the option to choose either pushing to “People who like your page and their friends” or “People you choose through targeting”. Also you will see a place where you will be able to set your budget.
Before you choose the pushing as mention, you need to know which one is best for your purpose. Lets’ began by saying you have a home based business or a business opportunity. For that to be true, one of the problems with the first option, “People who like your page and their friends”, is that your fan’s friend’s may not be interested in your business opportunity.
Again, define what your purpose for boosting your post. Boosting your first option is not bad, but again, think about those who may not be interested in your business.
If your goal is to engage your current fans, don’t choose the first option. You’re better off using a promoted post and choosing the ad only.
However, if you’ve already boosted a post to “People who like your page and their friends”, you can still change your audience. Just go to your Ads Manager and turn off the segment of the ad that goes out to “friends of fans”.
Again go back to the purpose and your goal. If your goal is to drive targeted traffic to your website, then choose the second audience option. “People you choose through targeting.”
The targeting option lets you select which people you want to reach, as well as their location, age, gender and up to 10 interests.
When you choose a targeted boosted post, it’s typically to drive traffic to your website or blog (where you have a strong call to action). Even though you’re sending people away from Facebook, keep in mind that you’ll still pay for the engagement.
The boost post ad with targeting is a quick way to set up an ad, but if you really want to focus on driving traffic to your website or blog, I suggest doing a website conversion ad.
Boosted Post…More Options
When you’ve set your audience and budget, you can click More Options and choose whether you want to spread the budget out over a few days (with a maximum of 7 days) and/or change the account that’s being charged.
When you boost a post, the ad results show up in your Facebook Ads Manager. From there you can monitor the ad, run more detailed reports and watch the performance. Notice in this boosted post that the bulk of the ad went to showing the ad to friends of fans.
All this may sound a bit complicated, it really is not. After you have done it a couple of times it will all make sense. Best advice here is just take it slowly, look at the different screens, check the options and soon it will become easy. Don’t worry about making a mistake…you will. Learning is doing, making mistakes and learning for the mistakes.
When To Promote A Post
The other way to push a post is to use the Ads Manager under Build Audience to promote a post. The benefit of promoting a post is that you have a more targeting, pricing and bidding options.
When you click Continue, you’ll see option that gives you more targeting options and you can even use a conversion pixel.
In the Connections area, you can choose that your ad only be shown to the people who like your page, but be aware that the default settings for locations limit who sees this ad unless you enter additional countries.
You also have different bidding and budgeting options with a promoted post. You can choose cost per click or spend a certain amount per day or even switch between models if you want to.
As with boosted post, your promoted post ad results will show in the Ads Manager so you can watch how your ad performs.
To get started promoting a post, just go to Boost Post, select your Audience…Click on Edit and go through the edit. Choose your Budget and Duration. Click on More Options which will be your payment.
There is one last type of ad you can create as a promoted post via the Ads Manager: a Dark Post (or unpublished post). These types of posts are good for people who are comfortable with Power Editor and want to do some additional testing on multiple ads.
Create an unpublished post (also called a dark post) if you’re using Power Editor or need to split test.
Why use a dark post? One advantage is that it doesn’t appear on you page’ timeline. It uses the structure of a promoted post, but your community won’t see it organically (i.e., as a regular update in their new feed); instead they’ll see it only as an ad.
That’s particularly handy if you’re doing split testing for several types of posts and you don’t want to inundate your audience with similar posts all in a row.
Dark posts are also a good solution if you’ve made a mistake in a timeline post (e.g., your image had too much text) and you don’t want to delete it and repost a corrected version just so you can promote it.
Boost Posts Getting Rejected
The Boost Post option is tempting. Let’s say you have a picture promoting your business or product. If you clicked this Boost Post button only to have your post rejected by Facebook it can be frustrating. The most likely reason that your post has been rejected is that the image you have shared contains more than 20 % text.
Facebook has a rule that the text can not contain more than 20% text. Use the Grid Tool on Facebook. When you do you will see the Facebook rule: “Ads that have more than 20% of text in their image won’t be approved to run on Facebook. Too much text can look like span and make people think that your ad is low quality. Make sure to use the headline and body of your ad to twll people more about why you’ve advertising and what you want them to do. Learn about Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines.
At the bottom of the page you will see many “Click” options: About..Create Ad..Create Page..Developers..Careers..Privacy..Cookies..Terms..Help.
Conclusion
There are many options and opportunities with Facebook. No article or book can cover all that can be done. Just as an article or book is written, Facebook makes a change and you out of date.
The best way to learn is to log-into your account and go through the various options. Don’t do anything, just click on each option see what it does, read and go to the next. Each time making a few notes. Some of the options will apply to your specific goals.
I personally, use Facebook everyday. I see changes in Facebook a lot. By going to my Facebook site everyday, I have become familiar with the concepts. When changes are made, it makes is much easier to adopt these changes. In fact you may find that as you read this blog post changes have already been made.
Again, become a student, learn all you can and stay current.
For example: On the Grid Tool, click on Create Ad. After which you will see “What kind of result do you want for your ads? You have 9 options. Click on each to see what they do.
Be clear on what you want to achieve with your ad.
In my opinion, most people should be using the promoted post option because it allows more control over who sees you ad and how you pay for it.
What do you think? Are you using promoted posts or boosted posts? What has your experience been? Share your thoughts with in the comments below!
Google Facebook Boosts Rules and get much more information.
If you didn’t read Part One of Facebook Marketing 101: A Few Tips You Need To Know… click here.
Thanks for visiting,
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