I decided to give Facebook advertising a try on a page I manage by boosting a post. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money, so I kept it under $5. I promoted two posts, at two separate times, and one post did amazing and the other did OK. In both cases, I spent less than $2.
The first post I promoted reached an extra 93 people, got two likes, and three shares. That may not sound like a lot but, because of those likes and shares, I got a lot of additional organic visibility. In the end, I reached nearly 900 people. All of this for only $0.32.
$0.32 you say? How is that possible?
Well, for each post you promote Facebook has to approve it and my post got denied by Facebook. However, the way the system works, the moment you agree to promote your post, Facebook starts promoting it. They do not approve it first, instead it goes live and, if they deny it, they shut it down and only charge you for the time your boosted post was live. This seems a little backwards, but you can promote posts you know Facebook will deny and get some additional exposure.
The second post I promoted didn’t get denied, but I did stop promoting it after a few dollars. It got to an extra 303 people, but I didn’t feel that was working as well as it should have so I stopped it before spending any more money. This time I spent $1.58.
For the price I paid, I’m very happy with the outcome. Boosting posts in Facebook works very well, however, we shouldn’t have to promote our posts or our fans.
The page I run has 1600 likes and each post gets to a fraction of those users. In the past week it’s been hard to get to 50. Before that I was averaging about 120. Months ago, I was averaging 500! So why don’t my posts get seen by my fans? Oh yea, money.
The truth is that we don’t pay for our Facebook accounts or for fan pages. So, to make income, Facebook makes us pay to reach more of our fans. Yes, on one hand it sucks, but it makes perfect business sense as it’s easy money with guaranteed ROI.
Additionally, how busy would your timeline be if you saw every post from every page you liked? That’d probably be pretty overwhelming.
Now my tests were not in-depth and I didn’t target anyone except for fans. With Facebook advertising, you can get super specific on who you promote your content to, or you can just toss it out there and see what happens.
If you manage a Facebook fan page, I’d recommend boosting some posts. For the low-cost, you’re going to get in front of a lot of people.