Effective social media boosting strategies for 2023

For agencies looking to solve their lead generation problem, social media is a goldmine. Not only does it provide you with the freedom to post whenever and whatever you want, but it also provides you with the luxury to boost your posts in a bid to reach your desired target audience. Target audiences vary from marketing agency to marketing agency. For some, it could be customers who are restaurant owners, while for others it could be roofers. Whoever it might be, it is imperative that agencies lock down their target audience before they start implementing social media boosting strategies.

Social media is an important communication channel. Ensure you create content that connects with your audience by downloading our free “White-label social media checklist” now.

Once you have your lighthouse client, it’s time for you to start creating social media content for those primary clients of yours and boost those posts on your social media channels.

It’s important to do so because it enables you to start focusing on some existing relationships instead of just trying to go out and get new leads, which as we all know can be both time consuming and expensive.

How to boost social media engagement: Best practices

Before getting into specific social media boosting strategies, it’s a good idea to get familiar with some general best practices that will help you get the most bang for your buck with your social media boosts. Whatever content you’re boosting, here’s how to boost social media engagement so you can reach your goals faster.

Know your audience

Understanding your target audience and their preferences is crucial in determining the type of content that will resonate with them and drives engagement. Conduct market research, analyze customer data, and use social listening tools to gain insights into your audience's needs, interests, and behavior. The more you understand your audience, the farther your efforts to boost content on social media will go.

Create quality content

High-quality, interesting content is a must if you want to generate engagement from your audience on social media. Use creative concepts, eye-catching visuals, and captivating copy to create dynamic content that truly resonates with your audience. Boosting social media posts is much easier when the content shines.

Use hashtags

Hashtags remain a powerful way to reach a larger targeted audience and increase visibility on social media. Use relevant, popular, and industry-specific hashtags to make it easier for people to discover your content, enhancing the reach of your social media boosts.

Encourage interaction

Encourage your audience to engage with your content by asking questions, running contests and promotions, and responding to comments, messages, and even negative reviews in a timely and personalized manner. This can help build a strong connection with audiences, driving higher levels of engagement.

Be consistent

Consistency is a non-negotiable key to success on social media. Develop a content calendar, schedule posts in advance, and stick to a regular posting schedule to ensure audiences stay engaged and invested in your brand. Regularly posting and interacting with your audience keeps your brand top-of-mind and builds a loyal following over time, whether you’re boosting social media posts or not. Social media management software makes it much easier to do so without being glued to an account all day.

When is the most effective time for social media boosting?

While lots of ink has been spilled writing about when the best time to post on social media is, you don’t have to worry about this as much when it comes to social media boosting. When you boost content, platforms will showcase it to more users throughout the duration of your promotion.

However, it is worth keeping track of the start time with social media boosting so that you can see if starting a promotion at a given time tends to produce better results.

Posting videos on social media

One of the key things that agencies can do when it comes to posting videos on social media is to repurpose the same piece of content and cross-post it on multiple channels at the same time.

This is a great way to generate leads from different platforms, while not having to go through the tedious process of creating fresh content for each one of them.

For example, one piece of pillar video content can be cut into three or four different formats depending on where it needs to be posted. You can cut it into a square and post it on Facebook or cut it in a 9:16 format and post it as a story on Instagram.

Once the videos are posted, it’s time to boost them. Of all the social media channels, the beauty of social media boosting on Facebook, or creating ads on the platform, is that you can make the videos look like they’re organic and make them visible to a specific demographic that you intend on targeting.

Another important thing to keep in mind while posting on social media is that everything must be uploaded natively. So, posting a YouTube link on Facebook is like driving into a BMW dealership with a Ford. All the algorithms are designed to benefit you when you post things natively.

Therefore, it makes more sense to post things independently on each platform. Furthermore, such a practice will keep you from being dependent on any one channel and ultimately help you maintain visibility in case one of the channels is down.

Social media boosting tips

Over the years, many people have asked me about my thought process behind how I determine which post is doing well and which post is doomed to fail.

The answer to that question is very simple. Just look at the metrics of your post.

Looking at the relationship between the reach and engagement statistics of a post can tell you whether it is doing well or not. Ideally, for a post to be considered great, the number of engagements should be closer to 10% of the reach number.

The engagement number can be impacted by a lot of factors, however. For example, there are certain comments that are worth more than other comments. Also, and this goes without saying, likes are not worth as much as comments.

In fact, if the ratio between the comments and likes on your post is out of proportion, then that’s a sign that either you have bad traffic or your content is made to just get people to click like. If your posts are getting a ton of likes and not many comments, that's not a good sign.

When it comes to social media boosting, I’ve seen agencies make many mistakes. One of the most common ones is to put an action button on the posts.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s no harm in putting a button on a boosted post. However, you must ensure that you don’t do so unless you intentionally want to drive them to a specific webpage.

My most-preferred tactic while boosting posts, which I do 90% of the time, is to make the post look natural. What this means is that my target audience sees no button.

Another mistake that most marketing agencies and local businesses make when it comes to naming their public figure pages on Facebook is to not name it after their own names.

The key is to showcase the public figure page as a person and, therefore, it must be named after you as an individual. Making the page look like a person increases the emotional connect quotient with the audiences, thereby leading to more traction and increased engagement.

The dollar-a-day boosting strategy

Before we decide to boost a post, it’s crucial that we choose the right target audience.

For example, let’s say that a video you plan to post has a famous person named John in it. When it comes to choosing an audience, you must ensure high relevancy. This means that boosting the post to a demographic that likes viewing content with John in it.

Furthermore, let’s say that John is a famous digital marketer. In that case, it also makes sense for me to boost the post to those audiences who have an inclination towards digital marketing.

Finally, it’s time to start pumping in some money. However, you can’t just start doing that without a proper structure in place. It’s true that you have all your posts lined out, but how do you really decide how much money needs to be put on which post?

I guess the question that everyone is asking is, how do you really find out your greatest hits? I do that using the dollar-a-day strategy. That’s $1 a day on each post for seven days.

The basic idea behind this strategy is to not make you spend a fortune, while at the same time helping you determine which post can generate the best return on investment for you.

Hence, pumping $1 per day on each post and then analyzing the performance metrics after a week helps you decipher which posts are working and are worth splurging more money on.

This concept dictates that you would spend just $1 a day on each individual post separately for seven days. Therefore, the most you’ll spend during that week is $7.

Once you’ve found out your greatest hits, it’s time to optimize them for maximum impact.

Kill

The optimization process starts with killing 90% of the posts that did not live up to your expectations and fizzled out. There’s no use wasting more time and money on such posts that either have a very high cost per engagement or a very low average watch time.

Expand

Next, it’s time to pump a little more money into posts that performed well under the initial boost. I usually add $30 more for another 30 days on them and then analyze the results once again after a month. This allows me to find one worthy post, which has the potential to be a unicorn.

Switch-boost

Once you find that winning post, it’s time to tweak a few things regarding the boosting dynamics. Depending on the situation, I tend to change the audience that I’m targeting through the posts.

For example, I might be speaking at a digital marketing conference sometime in the future and in that case I temporarily switch the targeting on the post to target that audience. Some of the posts that fall in this category live forever on our channels. They keep directing traffic and leads back to us for months at a time, all because we selected a custom audience.

Stack-boost

Finally, we end up finding those posts that we call unicorns. The reason these posts are called unicorns is because their performance is off the charts and they are the most impactful ones.

The aim now is to throw gas on the fire and pump more money into these posts, especially because they generate a solid return on investment. Furthermore, I also create multiple ad sets of the same post in order to have multiple audiences viewing these unicorn posts.

Using the dollar-a-day strategy is a smart way to test your posts before deciding to pump in a large amount of money on social media boosts. One dollar is the minimum amount you can put in and get meaningful results.

It’s also the simplest form of social media boosting. For just a small amount of money, you can sit back and let Facebook decide the number of people a post will be shown to. I let Facebook handle the microtargeting aspect of the boost, which is generally very accurate.

For example, if I select a target audience that has close to 500,000 people in it, spending $1 a day on a post for seven days could make my post be seen by around 100 to 300 people.

Social media boosting on 4 platforms

When it comes to the dollar-a-day, Facebook and Instagram are the only social media platforms where you can implement the strategy since that’s the minimum amount that they allow.  The same strategy outlined above can still be used for social media boosting on other platforms, you’ll just need a larger budget.

Here’s how to boost social media posts on 4 popular platforms: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and LinkedIn.

How to Boost: IG Post

You can boost IG posts easily in-app:

1. Head over to the post you want to boost. Underneath it and to the right, you’ll see a button that says “Boost”. Click it.
2. Complete the form generated by Instagram with information about how you want the post to be boosted. You’ll be able to provide audience details, select a goal, and set the budget and duration of your boost. Fill these out and click next.
3. Finally, review the information and click boost.

That’s all there is to it!

Even though Instagram is part of Facebook’s Meta and they have the same ad platform, I’ve experienced that boosting posts on Instagram doesn’t work as successfully as Facebook. This doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying, but you might want to keep this fact in mind.

How to Boost: Facebook Post

1. Go to the post you wnat to boost, and click the “boost post” button.
2. Complete the form with details about your boosted post, which will be similar to the form you complete to boost a post on Instagram.
3. Click “boost post now” when complete.

Download our guide to get boosting insights on Facebook

How to Boost: LinkedIn Post

1. Scroll to the post you want to boost and click the “Boost” button above it.
2. On the Boost page, choose an objective and select an audience template. These include profile-based audiences, interest-based audiences, and previously created audiences. Complete the fields for audience attributes.
3. Choose a start date, end date, and lifetime budget.
4. Click Boost.

LinkedIn is a little tougher because they want $10 a day as a minimum budget. However, if you choose a small audience and have really high-quality content, then you can get away with that.

How to Boost: TikTok Post

1. Navigate to the video you want to boost.
2. Click “Promote”.
3. Select a goal from the given options, and create a custom audience or select to option to have TikTok automatically create an audience.
4. Choose your budget and duration.
5. Click “Start Promotion”.

5 Mistakes to avoid with social media boosting

So far we’ve talked a lot about what to do, but what about what not to do? Avoid shooting yourself in the foot by being mindful of these common mistakes that can hinder social media boosting.

Here are some common mistakes to avoid with boosted social media posts:

1. Ignoring the target audience: Failing to properly target your audience can result in low engagement and a waste of advertising spend. Make sure to define your target audience clearly and use targeting options such as demographics, interests, and behaviors to reach the right people.
2. Poor content quality: No amount of marketing spend will make up for low-quality content. Low-quality or irrelevant content is unlikely to engage your audience and may even result in negative reactions. Make sure to create well-designed, visually appealing content that is relevant to the audience you want to engage.
3. Overloading on hashtags: Hashtags are like salt: a little is great, a lot is off-putting. Overusing hashtags can appear spammy and turn off your audience. Use a limited number of relevant and popular hashtags to increase visibility and engagement.
4. Neglecting metrics: Failing to regularly monitor and analyze the performance of your boosted posts can result in ineffective advertising campaigns. Use analytics tools to track metrics such as engagement rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to make data-driven decisions and optimize your future boosted campaigns.
5. Failing to optimize for mobile: With a majority of social media users accessing the platforms via mobile devices, it is essential to optimize your boosted posts for mobile viewing. This includes using mobile-friendly images, videos, and copy that is easy to read and engage with on a smaller screen.

Social media boosting is for everyone

It doesn’t matter what type of business you have. You could be a marketing agency, a Fortune 500 company, or a small business. The thing that remains common for everyone is that social media will always be the most important cog in the digital marketing wheel.

Creating quality posts and boosting them on such platforms will give your business a competitive edge over rivals by building your brand presence and increasing consumer traction.

Using the dollar-a-day strategy is not only a cost-effective strategy when it comes to deciphering which posts will give you the best ROI, but it’s also a great way to analyze the type of content your business ought to be producing in future. The intel you gather can help guide your content creation, white-label digital advertising, and other important componentes of your marketing strategy.

So, what are you waiting for? Create those winning posts and make dollar-a-day the most powerful advertising tool in your digital arsenal.