Facebook offers several ways to advertise services and products. In 2013, guest Nickie Storey-Bailey told us how to use Facebook ads to garner more “likes” for our author pages. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to boost individual posts to get them in front of more people.
I don’t have an author page, but I do have a page for my small publishing company. Each time we publish a new book, I post about it on Facebook and wait for approximately three people to see the post, two of whom are the author and me. Thanks to Facebook’s always-changing algorithms, it’s nearly impossible to get eyes on our pages and page-posts these days without paying for it. Thankfully, it doesn’t have to cost a fortune.
Post your status update first, and then click on the “Boost” button (red arrow below).
That will take you to the screen below (Image 2). From there, you can click on the dropdown (red arrow) to choose a button for your post if you’d like one. Choices are no button, shop now, book now, learn more, and sign up. I once ran an ad asking people to sign up for a newsletter, so used that button on my post. A note of caution: once your boosted post is approved, you can’t change the button choice. You can, however, delete your post and start over if you see you’ve made a mistake.
Most of my boosted posts don’t include a button, so I don’t select one. I do, however, choose my audience (blue arrow). I have several different audiences depending on what I’m boosting. Audience 1, which you can see toward the bottom of my list, is targeted to eBook readers who enjoy southern fiction. Down at the bottom of the screen (green arrow), you can see a place to click to create your own audience.
If you click to create your own audience, you’ll get the screen below. You can select your audience by gender, age, location, and interest.
Once you’ve selected your audience, close that out and you’ll go back to the first screen. Scroll down and you’ll reach the budgeting/payment section (see Image 4 below). You can see that I set my boosted post at $5.00 (red arrow). Facebook estimates it will be seen by 460-1,200 people (blue arrow). An aside: I assume by “seen” Facebook means it will be shown in 460-1,200 newsfeeds. Whether people actually “see” it is another topic entirely.
“Duration” gives the option of running it for one, seven, or fourteen days, but you can also set your own time limit (green arrow below). As you can see, I set mine for December 1, which was three days from the time I was typing this article. Down at the very bottom (orange arrow) is where you’ll click to pay. I probably should have left my Paypal account up there instead of blocking it out, just in case any kind souls here wanted to send me a payment. 😉 Once you’ve made payment, at the bottom right of the screen, cut off in my shot, you’ll see two buttons: Cancel, or Boost. Click Boost and you’ll get an email from Facebook saying your post will be boosted once it’s approved. Or, occasionally, Facebook picks up on something they think is too spammy and they’ll reject the ad, meaning you get to start over again.
Once your ad is done running, you’ll get an email from Facebook telling you how well it did, but if you want to see for yourself, click on “Insights” up on the toolbar from your home page and you’ll get a screen with all sorts of information regarding who has looked at or engaged with your page. Scroll down to “Recent Promotions” to see how your ads have done. As you can see (red arrow below), the ad I ran reached 402 people and had 22 post engagements.
It’s impossible to know whether any of those engagements resulted in a sale, but one thing is for certain: I wouldn’t have gotten nearly the views or engagement without the $5.00 boosted post, and as Lynne Cantwell explains, it’s all about effective frequency.
I’ve been doing this, too, and it’s pretty easy. On several occasions, I’be had to appeal a Facebook decision to decline the ad. According to their rules, not more that 20% of the ad or boosted post can be type. However, the type that is part of the product (like a book) doesn’t count. I’ve had to call their attention to the fact on these occasions that book cover type is excluded from the rule. They’ve always come back with an approval soon after that.
I’ve been rejected for that reason, too. I think I read somewhere recently that they’ve changed that rule. I’ll see if I can find it.
I’ve gotten that rejection, too. And then they accepted it. And then later they sent me a message stating, “Your ad isn’t doing as well as it could be because you have too much text.” LOL Oy.
I’ve had that one, too!
Looks like a good plan, especially for the price. I’ll have to try it. Thanks, Melinda.
Good luck, Melissa!
Thanks so much! Immensely helpful in determining how to “boost a post” to our best advantage. Pinned & shared. 🙂
Thanks, Linda!
Great post, Melinda, as I’ve been trying to work out how the whole paid advert. thing works. I’m still a bit confused though. When you say $5.00, do you mean the whole ad. only cost a total of $5, or it was $5 per day, or $5 per click??? Other? If it were a total of $5 all up I’d be in there like a shot but…I somehow think I’m misunderstanding the costing. 🙁
Good news – it was a total of $5.00. 🙂 I usually run 2-3 of these when I’m putting out a new book. You can’t beat the price! You choose the amount you’re willing to spend and set it for however many days you want it to run. On one of the screenshots above they show it broken down as a total of $5, for three days, meaning I spent approximately $1.66 per day.
I should also add that the more you spend, the more people they show it to. I was happy with 400, give or take.
I’ve had good coverage with boosted posts, too.
Something I never use for book ads, but would be great for a localized event like a book signing, is the “Location” function.
Great idea, Gordon. I have an event coming up in the spring I’ll have to try that with.