Chapter 8: Post Promotions
One of the best ways to boost your brand awareness and increase engagement on your social media profiles (for your wide-net retargeting or LLA’s) is to run post promotions on Instagram & Facebook. As a rule of thumb, I like to dedicate ~$100/day to post promos to make sure I’m constantly gaining followers on my social profiles and building engagement. This helps a lot with social proof and credibility, as people are less likely to trust ads from accounts that have no followers or engagement. That being said, you should only dive into these once you have the disposable budget to do so - if you’re just starting out, focus on conversion optimized ads first.
The process for promoting posts is fairly similar on both Instagram & Facebook - simply navigate to a given post and hit the blue “promote” or “boost” button. There you’ll be prompted to select your target audience, budget, duration, and goal.
Let’s walk through the Instagram process first:
When you click the “boost” button on an Instagram post, the first option you’re going to have is to select your goal. The options are:
Visit your profile
Visit your website
Message you
A mix of actions
For Instagram promo’s, the best option is always going to be “Visit your profile”. This is your best chance at getting more followers, which is exactly what we’re after when boosting IG posts.
Next, we have the option to select our audience. Instagram is going to default to “Suggested audience”, which basically means automatic targeting. In my experience, this is pretty terrible (but go ahead and test it, honestly who knows it might work for you). I prefer to hit the “Create your own” button, which gives us the option to turn off Advantage+ audience. Like I said, I hate Advantage+ audience, so I basically always turn it off, but really it’s up to you. From here we can name our audience, select a location and minimum age, and finally, pick your interest groups. Here, we actually get to do detailed interest targeting, so dive on in. I recommend picking a relatively broad audience, with 5-10 different interest groups that you think will be applicable to your audience. We definitely don’t want to get too specific here, so feel free to mix and match things like “Luxury goods”, “Yachts”, and “Ferrari”. After you create these custom audiences in Instagram, you can save them and re-use them later in future promo’s.
Next you get to choose your budget and duration for the promotion. I recommend spending $5-10/day for 4-6 days, and then evaluating the performance. After we run a few promos, we can find the best performers and increase the spend to capitalize on maximum engagement. Finally, review everything and you’re good to go.
Next, let’s go through Facebook (it’s basically the same):
Navigate to any of your Facebook posts and click the blue “Boost post” button. I prefer to do this on a computer, but you can do this on a phone too if you like.
At the top, we have the option to select our goal. This defaults to “Automatic”, which makes absolutely no sense to me. Click “change” and optimize for Engagement (for a video, this will be “get more video views”).
Next, we have the option to either keep our original post copy, or split test the original copy with a few AI generated variations. I think this is a great option, so take a look at the suggested AI generated variations and see if they’re applicable to your posts. You also have the option to directly edit or regenerate these options if you don’t like them, or simply turn them off. In general though, more options tends to help performance.
Next, we have the option for Advantage+ creative. I turn this off, since I don’t know what edits Meta is going to be making to my posts, and I frankly don’t trust them to be cropping my pictures or videos.
Next we have the button which will show on the promotion. You can make this whatever you want, and likely have it direct to your website. Chances are most people are not going to click this though, so don’t think about it too hard. You can also turn the button off all together if you really just care about engagement.
Finally we have the chance to choose our audience. The setup here is basically the same as Instagram, with options to choose our own targeting and build our own interest-based audiences. Unlike Instagram, you also have the option to use any saved or custom audiences from your ad account on Facebook post boosts, which can be nice if you have some high-converting saved audiences. Your Instagram post promo audiences will not show up here, so you’ll need to create new ones even if you use basically the same targeting. You will however be able to save your promotion audiences for new promotions.
At the end we have to pick our budget and duration, which I recommend be the same as Instagram. $5-10/day for 4-6 days, and then evaluating the performance.
Once you have a few post promo’s running, you’ll want to compare them side-by-side. Generally a good baseline metric is 1,000 Reach for every $1 spent, although you’ll be surprised how few of your boosted posts actually make it to that ratio or better. If you do have some post promos that are doing really well, it’s imperative to NOT let the budget/duration run out! Make sure to catch them before the promotion ends, and manually go in and increase the budget and duration. If you wait until the promotion is over and try to re-boost with a higher budget, the ad is going to have to completely re-optimize and may not get the same results. When you have a winner, catch it early, and ramp up that budget as much as you can afford.
Typically, I like to promote every single post I put up to Facebook and Instagram, and spend about $20-25 boosting each to see which performs best. Once I have a good performer, I catch it early, and ramp up the budget to $50+/day with a 14-30 duration.