7 Simple Steps to Boost Your Facebook Post

I have discussed this in previous posts, but we must remember that social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are a business. Most of them are now public companies trading on a stock exchange and must answer to their shareholders, and those individuals want money. This need for revenue, and monetizing social media, is making it harder and harder to reach everyone with your social media posts. This is why we as districts must start think about allocating budget monies toward boosting posts on Facebook and Twitter.

Boosting a post is an inexpensive way (compared to traditional advertising) to reach certain demographics with certain interests and hobbies.

Here are SEVEN SIMPLE STEPS to Boost Your Post on Facebook.

1. Click the BOOST POST Button on the Bottom of the Post - this button will pop-up a window that relates to steps two through six.

2. Decide Who on Facebook You Want to Target - there are three options of who to target on Facebook: People Who Like Your Page, People Who Like Your Page and Their Friends, and People You Choose Through Targeting

Targeting is the key to expand your reach and get very narrow in you campaign targeting. By choosing this option (People You Choose) you can be very selective on who you target by using Facebook’s demographic options.

3. Decide Where You Want to Promote Your Post - you can narrow your focus to COUNTRY, STATE or CITIES. Being a school district with set boundaries, we select cities in our district from the drop-down menu, and then input the cities or zip codes we want to target. You can also choose a radius in miles around the cities you choose. We select zero so we can be very narrow in our targeting.

4. Select an Age Range - this can range from 13 years of age to a selection called 65 plus years of age. Most of our campaigns focus on the 25 to 45 year old demographic.  This would be the typical age group for our parents.

Depending on our campaign, we can target our students by narrowing the range from 13 years of age to 18 years of age. We can also target the senior citizens (more likely to vote in elections) in our community that might be on Facebook by using the 65 plus selection. The age range selection tool can help narrow the target audience much easier than a radio ad, billboard or other traditional media.

5. Select a Gender - most of the time we target both male and female in our social media campaigns. However, there have been times when just targeting males or females might be the correct move when posting our campaigns. This really depends on the type of post.

6. Select Interests of Target Audience - this can be huge when you have a specific campaign geared toward a certain group in your district or community. You could target people interested in Real Estate (Realtors who bring people into your community), target people interested in Football (Athletic/Football Season Campaign), or you can target people interested in coffee (community coffee sponsored by your district).

The choices are endless. This tool can be a very valuable and can target a very specific audience much better than traditional advertising methods.

7. Select Your Budget Amount - depending on how many people you want to reach determines how much you need to spend. The more you spend, the more people you are going to reach. We typically set our campaigns at $10. This give us about 2,000 to 3,000 impressions or post views. That is a great RETURN ON INVESTMENT. Much better than most advertising methods.

**You must setup credit card information on your Main User Account.

1. Go to Settings by clicking on the small triangle on the top right corner next to the world icon
2. Select Payments link on the left side of the page
3. Select Edit Payment Methods
4. Enter Credit Card Information

***WARNING - your post picture cannot contain more than 20% text or it will be rejected by Facebook’s advertising department.