How to Use Facebook Boosted Posts to Help You Sell Books

How to Use Facebook Boosted Posts to Help You Sell Books

Aerio Staff

Do your Facebook posts usually reach just a portion of your page followers?

This in large part can be attributed to Facebook’s policy change in early2018, to prioritize "meaningful conversations" among family, friends,colleagues and community members. This change has put a strain on FacebookBusiness pages, now struggling to reach followers and grow their audience with organic content.

One way you can bridge this gap and expand your reach, while promoting yourbooks & your brand, is to develop a strong Facebook boosting strategy.

Boosting a Facebook post helps you reach more of your fans, as well asreach new audiences. It’s also fairly easy to do, with just a few clicksright from your profile page dashboard. Best of all, a boosted post is one of the most cost-effectiveways to advertise; depending on how many people you want to reach, you canboost for as little as a few dollars a day.

The first step in your Facebook boosting strategy involves audienceselection.

Choose Your Audience for Effective Facebook Advertising

Facebook's targeting options allow you to choose your ideal audiencemembers based on a variety of factors. When you boost a post you have threeaudience choices:

1. Your page followers- This option works well when you want toensure that you reach more of your followers.

2. Friends of your followers- This option expands your audience, asyour followers' friends may have similar tastes and interests. Think aboutit - When you see a friend likes an author, entertainer, or brand, you’remore likely to take notice than when seeing a page with no connection toyour circles.

3. Targeted audiences- Use this option if you want to expand youraudience beyond friends of your current followers. Facebook offers animpressive range of targeting options including age, gender, location, andinterests.

These three targeting options serve as tools to help you reach more of your audience or expand your audience. Once yourecognize the audience you want to reach, you need strong content.

5 Ways to Identify Your Book Audience & Start Marketing

Creating Content to Boost

The success of your boosted post depends on how well the content resonateswith your intended audience. Remember, a boosted post is a different fromother social advertisements, since the content also appears within your feed like any other status update.

To start, you’ll want to create great content that inspires engagement.Your post may offer a first impression to the people you reach - If theyrelate to the content, they may choose to follow your page, and possiblyeven buy your book. Engagement is also important with Facebook’s algorithm,as it favors content that inspires engagement; the more people that engage,the greater your reach.

Try these tips to create content that engages your chosen audience:

  • Test your content first. A great way to do this is to post your content, then wait for organic engagement before boosting. This can serve as an indication of how well the content will resonate.
  • Consider creating a video . Content containing videos tends to inspire more engagement.
  • Aim to include engaging, quality images with any posts that do not feature video.

Add Fireworks to Your Digital Marketing Campaigns with GreatContent

Promote Natural Engagement but Avoid Engagement Baiting

Choose content that inspires engagement, but avoids "engagement baiting,"as Facebook promotes authentic engagement but demotes pages who overtly askfor engagement.

Sometimes the difference is not clear to new advertisers. The followingexamples illustrate the difference between natural engagement and baiting:

  • Natural Engagement : A writer posted a comment about a current pop culture event that interests her audience. A few fans like or share the comment. Perhaps others spontaneously comment. These are examples of natural engagement, meaning Facebook will favor this content, as it inspired these kinds of responses.

Engagement Baiting: The same writer posts "Like this post if youlike chocolate and share if you prefer vanilla." Facebook demotes pagesthat spam users for engagement and contribute to poor user experiences.

  • Natural Engagement : A writer uses Facebook’s poll option to gather opinions on a few book cover options.

Engagement Baiting: A writer publishes a post, asking fans totag a friend who should read their book.

The engagement guidelines relate to both boosted and organic content. Whenusers choose to engage with your content, some of their friends see it.When you boost your most engaging content, you reach your existing fans,your paid audience and you also reach their friends.

4 Book Marketing Tips to Engage Your Readers

More Tips On How to Boost A Post On Facebook:

  • Be selective about what content you boost. Boost your most engaging, quality content for the best results.
  • Carefully consider the audience you wish to reach and tailor the content to appeal to that audience.
  • Pay attention to your audience insights and analytics to see what type of content resonates. For example, some audiences love inspirational content while others prefer humor.

A basic boosted post serves as a great introduction to advertising on Facebook. It offers an opportunity to make better use of your most engaging conten to promote your books, your brand, and increase your reach. Although boosting is easy, socialmedia advertising is a sophisticated, ever-changing field. Make sure to doyour research, to inform your overall digital marketing strategy with thelatest content creation and promotion techniques.