MSP Marketing: The Basics of Boosting on Social Media

One of the things that is great about social media is that it is free for your business to use. However, as a company in the B2B space, you’re greatly limiting the success of your company if you don’t consider utilizing some of the paid aspects of these platforms. One way to get started is to consider promoting, or ‘boosting’, the posts you are already doing.

Why You Should Consider Boosting

Paid social advertising allows you to actually reach your desired audience. You may have noticed already on your social media channels that a lot of your posts haven’t been viewed that many times, even though you’re doing everything right in terms of the content you’re sharing.

So, what gives?

With social media, your audience is typically limited by the number of people who follow your page. And even if your page has a lot of followers, this doesn’t guarantee your followers will see your posts: your post may not show up in their feed because of the platform’s algorithms, followers may miss out on posts relevant to them because they’re too busy to check social media, and so on.

To sum it up, unless an individual is actively going out of the way to visit your business’ page (typically only business decision makers considering doing business with you), the majority of your posts won’t receive much traction.

Note that boosting your post is different from running a paid campaign on social media. Also, with any boost that you do, make sure there is an image or video included with your text. Posts with images or videos perform drastically better across all social media platforms. And, since you’re paying to have your post reach a larger audience, you want your money spent to be worth your while.

Boosting on Facebook

If you’re going to consider paying to promote on any social media platform, Facebook is where you should start. Facebook is the ideal platform to be boosting your posts because it’s the platform that most of your target audience is on and checking regularly: 68% of U.S. adults have Facebook accounts, and 74% of those adults are checking their Facebook at least once a day. And, because approximately one-third of Facebook users engage with brands on a regular basis, marketing your company through Facebook is a good investment.

You can boost in three different ways on Facebook: to people who like your page, to people who like your page and their friends, and to a selected audience based on criteria like age, job roles, interests, and location.

After you’ve begun promoting your posts on Facebook, you can use Facebook’s remarketing tools to reach more people. There are two options:

• Custom Audience: Target people based on people who have interacted with your brand before. Options include people who have visited your website, people who have purchased on your website, and people on your email list.
• Lookalike Audience: Target people that are similar to your current audience, introducing you to new users who are likely to engage with you.

When promoting your posts, you set a budget. Once that budget runs out, your post will no longer be promoted.

Promoting on Other Social Media Platforms

Facebook isn’t the only social media platform in which you can pay to promote your company on. You can also consider the following:

Twitter

Twitter can be good for businesses to use because the number one reason that people use Twitter is to discover something new and interesting. Twitter users do this often by searching for their topic of interest. Because they are searching for information, Twitter is able to use particular keywords to direct individuals to your advertisement, much as paid search engine ads.

There are two different ways you can promote your content on twitter:

• Twitter Promote Mode: automatically promote your Tweets (up to 10 per day) to the audience you specify, and promotes your account as a whole. You can target people by who they follow, specific keywords, or based on demographics (location, age, and gender) and behavior (device using, interests). With Twitter promote mode, you pay a monthly fee that allows you to reach up to 30,000 additional people
• Quick Promote: promote each tweet individually, set your location you want to target and select your budget.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the go-to place for business decision makers to find information. And, since users have their professional background on their pages, it can be easy to target your desired audience by company, job title, and job function and set things to reach within your company’s service area.

Boosting your content on LinkedIn will make your content appear in your selected audience's newsfeed as Sponsored Content. LinkedIn also allows you to run Direct Sponsored Content, which is a sponsored update that doesn’t appear on your company page. This allows you to test your promotional content without cluttering up your company’s own page.

YouTube

YouTube is one of the biggest search engines and most trafficked websites in the world. So, if you have video content on there, chances are you can achieve success by promoting your videos.

Because YouTube is owned by Google, you have to use Google AdWords to promote your video. You’ll have to set up a campaign in order to have your video show up as a sponsored video; in AdWords, a boosted video would be considered a Discovery Ad. Once you do that, you can define your audience by gender, age, parental status, and income. You can further narrow down your audience by creating Affinity audiences (groups of people based on their long-term interest in a particular topic), In-market audiences (consumers actively researching products), and use specific keywords, topics, and placements.

Instagram

Although Instagram is a much newer platform compared to the other four we’ve discussed, it’s a great way to target potential customers because it’s the social media platform users spend the most time on per day on average. Also, because Instagram is now owned by Facebook, you can manage your Instagram ads through Facebook’s ad platform or through the Instagram app.

Once your Instagram is set up as a business account, you can boost based on an objective of having people visit your website or giving your business a call / visit. You set your call to action button, choose your audience based on age, gender, location, and interests, and then set a budget.

Need Help With Social Media?

If there’s anything you need in regards to your social media, whether it’s setting up your channels, generating content, or running campaigns, we can help. Contact us today to learn more.