A Boosted Post Seen Mostly Outside BC

Thousands reached, no calls

The Boost Post button under a Facebook page post is the quickest way to spend money on Facebook. Choose an amount and a number of days, pick an audience, and the post goes out.

Many owners pick the audience Facebook offers first: people who like your page and their friends. It sounds like the warmest audience you could ask for.

The results then report thousands of people reached and a respectable number of likes. The phone rings no more than usual.

Very often the reason is simple. Most of the people reached do not live anywhere near the business.

Who actually likes your page

Fans arrive over years, from many directions, and few owners ever look at who they are.

• Contest entrants from a giveaway years ago, many from far away.
• Relatives and old friends of the owner and staff, often abroad.
• Former customers who have since moved to another province.
• Tourists who liked the page while visiting.
• Other businesses that liked it to be neighbourly.
• Accounts that like hundreds of pages, some of them fake.

The first does the most damage to a local page. Until last November, pages could make a like the price of entering a contest.

Contests picked up by giveaway websites drew entrants from across North America. They liked the page for the prize, and most of them are still there.

Friends of fans follow the fans

Adding their friends multiplies whatever the fan list already is. Friends of a fan in Ontario mostly live in Ontario; friends of a relative in England mostly live in England.

The friends of your local fans are a good audience. But the option cannot tell them apart from the rest, and the more distant fans you have, the more of the budget goes to people who could never become customers.

Facebook then reports the result as reach, which counts a stranger in another country exactly the same as a neighbour three streets away.

Where your fans live

Page Insights shows the answer. Under the People tab, Facebook lists where your fans live by country and by city, and does the same for the people your posts reached.

Look at both before the next boost. A local business whose fans are mostly local can keep using them. One whose top cities are a thousand kilometres away has its answer.

Facebook's ad reports can also break past boosts down by location, which shows where the money actually went.

Choose the audience every time

The boost screen has a third option: people you choose through targeting. For a business that serves one area, it should be the default.

Start with location. Choose the towns you serve, or a distance around your address, and nothing outside them.

Then narrow carefully, with an age range that fits your customers and perhaps one or two interests. Each extra condition shrinks the audience, and too narrow an audience costs more for each person reached.

Keep the same audience from one boost to the next, so the results can be compared. Changing the location, the age range and the post all at once makes it impossible to tell what worked.

A worked example

An oil tank removal company with two crews digs out old heating oil tanks buried in the yards of older houses across a handful of suburbs, where a house sale often turns up a tank nobody knew about.

Its Facebook page has a few thousand fans. Most arrived three years ago, during a contest that offered a tablet to anyone who liked the page, and giveaway websites spread it far and wide.

In the spring the owner boosted a post about tank searches before a sale, choosing people who like the page and their friends. The results showed thousands reached and plenty of likes. Calls were no different from any other week.

Page Insights explained it. The biggest groups of fans lived in Ontario and the United States, and only a small share of the people reached lived in the suburbs the crews work in.

The next boost went to adults in those suburbs only, chosen by location, with no fans or friends in it. The reach figure was far smaller, and almost all of it was in the area the business serves.

The distant fans are still on the page. The company simply stopped paying to reach them.

Reach is not the measure

Reach and likes are what the results screen shows, so they are what owners judge by. Neither pays for a tank removal.

Judge a boost by what it was for: calls, quote requests, messages, visits to the page about the service.

If the post links to your website, tag the link for Analytics, with a few extra words after the address naming the campaign, so the visits it sends are counted on their own.

A boost that reached fewer people, all of them nearby, is worth more than one that reached the world.

A boosted post is still an ad

Boosting turns an ordinary post into an advertisement, reviewed against the same rules as any other Facebook ad.

It also means the post should work as an ad: one clear subject, the area you serve stated plainly, and a reason to call now. Naming the towns in the text helps the right people recognise themselves.

And it has to make sense to strangers. A boost reaches people who have never heard of you, so a post written for regulars, full of first names and shared jokes, falls flat.

The counter-case

Some businesses genuinely serve people far away. A resort, a tour operator or a shop that ships across Canada may find distant fans are exactly the right audience.

A page built slowly from real customers, with no contests in its past, may have fans who are overwhelmingly local, and boosting to them and their friends can work well.

For a business serving one area, check where your fans live, and choose every boost's audience by location first.

Before the next boost

1. Open Page Insights and find where fans live.
2. Check where your last boost actually reached.
3. Choose people through targeting, not fans and friends.
4. Set the location to the places you serve.
5. Add an age range that fits your customers.
6. Tag the link so Analytics shows the visits.
7. Judge the boost by calls, not by reach.

Step four is the one that keeps the budget inside the area you serve. Everything else improves a boost; the location setting decides whether it reaches anyone who could become a customer.

The rules for the picture in that ad are covered in Facebook's twenty percent rule for ad pictures.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.