The why of boosting posts on social media

Putting a budget behind your posts can immediately increase your reach and expand your audience. While organic posts will reach some of your page followers, supporting those posts with a small budget can exponentially increase the number of users who see your content.

According to a recent study, the average CPM (cost per thousand impressions) on the Facebook ads platform is $14.90, meaning it could cost you less than $15 to reach 1,000 new people*. If you consider it even further, $100 may get you to over 6.6K new people, while $500 can get your post in front of over 33K new people.

Spending money to increase reach and broaden your audience is key.

While spending money will further expand your audience, one of the primary reasons to boost posts is the ability to reach specific targeted audiences. With boosting posts, you’re not just tossing your posts into the ether, but rather, you can cherry-pick the people you want to reach through various targeting opportunities.

While social platforms differ slightly, each offers robust targeting options to reach users by demographics, interests, behaviors, and more. Depending on your business goals, selecting both platforms and targeting carefully is key. Here’s what we mean:

• Are you looking to reach entry-level business professionals with your latest webinar? LinkedIn has your audience.

• Are you targeting a younger demographic with your new cosmetic product? TikTok is the place to be.

• Do you need to boost organic health-related content to Gen X? Look no further than Facebook.

• Want to reach Gen Z with a fancy new tumbler brand? Try Instagram.

Social media algorithms are known to rely on audience engagement to determine which posts and brands to give favor to. There is only a limited amount of real estate on the social media newsfeed, so boosting posts will continuously improve your chance of grabbing that much sought-after space.

Generally, organic posts perform better alongside boosted posts with high engagement.

Here are some key considerations for your strategy when you choose to boost posts:

• Budget: Consider how much of your budget you have available to spend, how you want to spend it, and for how long. Should you spend all your budget upfront or throttle it over a long period? Do you want to stretch it over multiple campaigns or run it over multiple variations?

• Audience Size: You must review your audience and make sure it’s not too large or too small. If you’re only spending a few hundred dollars, you don't want to target 100 million people, as it’s not the best way to effectively spend your budget. Conversely, your audience can be substantially more vast if you're spending a million dollars

• Targeting: When selecting your audience, you must choose whether to go broad or reach a more niche audience. For example, if you’re advertising a large healthcare brand, determine if you want to reach healthcare professionals or anyone who has ever expressed interest in health on social media

• Objectives: Boosting your posts to align with the creative and your KPIs. You can increase engagement, build awareness, increase website traffic, generate new leads, and more. Choosing the right objective is important.

• Placements: You’ll rarely want to use automatic placements when boosting your posts. When choosing manual placements, consider format type and goals.

• Best Practices: When boosting your posts, you’ll rarely want to use automatic placements. The platform may even prompt you to hit the button. However, we don’t recommend this. Using each platform’s individual ads manager to boost your posts will give you substantially more control over targeting, budgeting, placements, and more.

The Khoros Strategic Services Team regularly works with our customers to support them with their boosting efforts, from execution and strategy to reporting.

• The Khoros team worked with one of our customers to increase their boosted post-budget by 500% yearly from 2021 to 2022. We then repeated that increased spending in 2023. The teams collaborated to execute over $600K in spending, recording over 131 million impressions.

• Recently, we helped one customer use boosted posts to introduce their content to new audiences. Ultimately, this led to a more robust paid strategy that ran dark ads and LinkedIn boosts. Over a few months, the team executed 17 boosted posts, tested five different audiences, and recorded over 17.6 million impressions.