Three Advantages of Paid Ads on Social Media
I often get the question “What does the ‘Boost Post’ button do?” Boosting a post essentially allows you to run a paid advertisement on a specific social media post to place it on the timelines of targeted users, regardless of whether they already follow your page or not. There are three primary advantages of doing this:
- Your post gets pushed out in front of more total users.
- Your post gets pushed out in front of new users outside of your current following.
- You’re able to target who you want it in front of based on certain criteria or interests (or allow the platform to use its own technology to determine the most relevant audience based on the data they have available).
We’ll use one of our recent Instagram posts and boosted ad as an example:
This post is one of our “Color of the Week” posts where we highlight a color for our design and creator community. As of the time of this writing, the post had over 15,000 views. Our page has nearly 4,500 followers, so this is over a 3x view count. Pretty nice. Let’s explore how boosting this post with just $60 took the results to another level:
Of the 15,000 total views, over 9,000 of those views came from the paid ad. That means about 60% of the viewership was a result of the ad, and we would have had significantly lower results without it. These 9,000 views would also be outside of our organic following, which is what I see as being the biggest advantage. This allows us to consistently gain significant numbers of followers, leading to the foundational organic following of our page growing over the long term.
As you can see, we picked up almost 200 new followers as the result of this ad, further enforcing the effectiveness of placing the content in front of users who are not already following our page. This also confirms that the users targeted by the ads were the relevant users, as they showed enough interest in our content to press the follow button. We opt to allow the algorithm to do the heavy lifting when it comes to targeting, but if you wanted to target a specific geographic area or provide other targeting hints to the platform, that’s something we could set up. Compound these results on other posts over the long run, and your pages can gain a significant increase in its base following of relevant users. Not to mention, the bigger the budget, the more power and capability you’re able to put behind your ads.
Interested in learning more about boosting your posts or potentially tapping Echelon One Media to manage your social page? Shoot us an email at info@echelon1media.com for a no-obligation consultation.
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