How Do Facebook Sponsored Posts Work?
As organic Facebook reach continues to decline for businesses, it’s becoming increasingly more
important for your brand to leverage paid content in order to boost its visibility.
If you want to make sure that a greater number of your fans and followers are able to see your content on Facebook, you often have to pay to get better reach. Facebook sponsored posts appear in the Facebook user’s news feed just as any other post from your brand might.
On Facebook, a business can sponsor a post through their business profile by selecting the post they want to sponsor, setting a maximum budget for a set number of days, and choosing their targeting options. By giving a post a broader reach, it’s seen by more people, leading to increased brand awareness and user engagement.
How To Boost Facebook Post
Facebook sponsored posts, sometimes called a Facebook boost post, are posts which a business pays to deliver to a larger audience than their following. They are created through a business profile and run for short-term campaigns, usually for no longer than a week
When you’re viewing the posts on your page, you’ll see the option to “Boost Post.” This option allows you to promote a single post that’s already existing on your page without the need to create an ad through the Facebook ad system.
You’ll set a budget of what you’ll pay to promote it, a time frame, and general audience targeting criteria. This all happens on one small pop-up screen, and boom – you’re done.
FREE Checklist: How To Run Successful Facebook AdsFacebook Sponsored Posts
Sponsored posts will display your ad in the newsfeed, and will look similar to those created in Ads Manager. The “boost post” option was really designed to offer a simpler, less overwhelming option to participate in Facebook Ads for those who were intimidated by the system.
The benefits to sponsored posts are pretty easy to grasp. They’re easy to use, easy to create, and they give you a lot of really great social proof, even if you don’t have any experience with Facebook Ads.
When your organic post is promoted through the ad system, all social proof that you currently have on it gets promoted, too. All those likes, comments, and shares are visible and help your ad make a good impression right from the get-go.
When to Use Facebook Sponsored Posts
Facebook sponsored posts are a good option when you want to utilize the social proof you already have on an organic post to get better results.
As an added bonus, all the social proof you gain while paying to promote your ad will go to live on the original organic posts, too. That’s a pretty good perk, and it’s an efficient and sure-fire way to accumulate a great deal of social proof that will benefit you on a moving forward basis.
Sponsored posts are also a good option if you just need to post a single post to a pretty broad audience, or to your current audience. If you don’t need to go through the ad system, then save yourself some time and opt to utilize this.
How To Create Facebook Sponsored Posts
Find the post that you’d like to promote in your feed, and hit “Boost Post.” A small pop-up screen will appear. You’ll be asked to choose your targeting criteria and to set your budget, as well as the duration of your campaign.
Review your post in the right-hand preview bar, and then hit “Boost Now.” Note that when choosing posts to boost, the following are not eligible:
- Profile picture update posts
- Drafts
- Posts containing a link to a note
- Mobile app install posts (you need to run these through the ad platform)
- Full albums
- Scheduled live videos
- Live videos for unverified pages
- Posts you’re featured in
Best Practices For Facebook Sponsored Posts
- Remember that engagement is the focus. You don’t get to choose to optimize for clicks, or for conversions.
- Brand awareness and engagement are the priorities here, so keep the hard selling to ad campaigns that can help you get the results you’re looking for.
- Choose posts with a lot of social proof already. Not only do you know your audience will respond well to these posts, but the social proof that already exists on the post will also help you attract more visitors.
- Include visual elements. This can be a video or an image but either way, if you’re paying to boost a post, include something visual to draw user attention. This will significantly increase the results you get across the board.
- Sponsored posts are best used when the goal is to increase engagement with a certain post or piece of content.
- Sponsored posts can only be used to promote a page that already exists.
- Though you are able to post different types of content, there is only one format for sponsored posts.
- You have the option to display your sponsored post content in both the desktop news feed and mobile news feed.
Facebook Sponsored Posts vs Ads
Here are just a few occasions where you may want to use sponsored posts as opposed to an ad.
- Improving visibility for popular content: When you find that certain pieces of content are performing better than others, you can boost these posts to improve visibility and drive more engagement for this popular content.
- Getting the word out about events: If you want to increase event attendance and improve social proof, you can create a sponsored Facebook post announcing an upcoming event.
- Sharing user-generated content: When your business has some great user-generated content that you want to repost, you can boost the post. This helps generate new followers and improve brand trust.
- Making important announcements: If your business has a big announcement to make, such as the grand opening of a new location or brand-new product release, you can use a sponsored post to boost visibility and engagement.
The decision about whether to use sponsored posts versus ads or organic content will ultimately depend on your company’s goals, budget, and overall digital marketing strategy. Some businesses use both types of paid content promotion, depending on the specifics of each social media campaign.
Free Checklist: Facebook Ads Guide
Although everything about Facebook isn’t perfect, the truth is that with more than two billion users per month, Facebook advertising strategies still work. Yes, they do make changes to their Facebook advertising guidelines without notice which can be frustrating. But if you remain diligent and watch your ad spend and results carefully, you’ll get a good return on your investment. For tips and information, download my free Facebook Ads Guide PDF and make the best use of your Facebook sponsored posts and ads.
