Tempted to Boost Your Facebook Post? Here's What You Should Know

Imagine you've been on Facebook for about a month and you haven't built the popularity and traction that Facebook is famed for providing.  You’ve been seeing the “Boost Post” button at the bottom right corner of your eyecare posts and you’re wondering if this button holds the secret to everything you have been looking for from this platform.

You’re on the right track. Facebook remains an incredible marketing tool for optometrists, ophthalmologists, and other healthcare practitioners as more than 59% of online users worldwide use this platform. This means with the right knowledge in your pocket, you can leverage this tool to meet and connect with patients who are looking for your services. 

 Here’s how.

What happens when you click the Facebook Boost Post button?

Facebook takes you through a series of self-explanatory steps to get the most out of your post and investment. You will have to set the goal for the post, your target audience, page boost duration, and budget. This also means you will have to provide your payment information to Facebook.

Once you're done with this, Facebook pushes your boosted post to the top of your target’s newsfeed ensuring they see what you have to say. This post will appear to them like any other regular Facebook post with the text, images, video, and links in the right places. The only major difference is the customized call-to-action (CTA) and a greyed “sponsored” text underneath the page’s profile image.

Before you boost a post, there are a few things to consider. 

First: Narrow down your target audience by geographical area. If your practice is in a large metropolitan area, drill down to your immediate town or neighborhood. With this targeted approach, you'll save money and hone in on potential patients geographically closest to your office.

Second: Decide how long your "boost" should run. For most eyecare offices, the best time to run a Facebook Boost would be from Monday to Thursday. These are the times when people may be searching for your services. It also gives potential patients the ability to see your ad and make arrangements for an appointment that fits into their work or social schedules. 

What are good posts to boost?

Now that you know how Facebook boosts your post, it’s time we looked at which posts deserve your financial investment.

Most times, not all your posts will deserve the Boost button. Some are the content you published to keep your community engaged. Other's might be lacking the key ingredient- a measurable call to action- which makes a post boost-worthy

It's great to get likes and build awareness. That's the easy part. But it doesn't always translate to a knock on the door the next day or to a phone call and booking an appointment. A boost-worthy post is composed of a few parts:

1. Have a measurable call to action – The post should surround an event you have planned, an online meeting, registering to your newsletters, or booking an appointment for your services. It should likely lead to your promotional landing page or appointment scheduling form.

2. Should already have some engagement – If you're a prospective patient and see a post with 0-3 engagements, would you easily believe, like, or follow what the post says? Probably not. Likes and follows are social proof of your prowess in eyecare. If your post isn't engaging as-is, a boost may not solve your problems.

If you already have an active community, you should allow your audience to engage with your post before boosting it. This makes it easier for your new audience to convert.

 As a bonus, the post link should lead to a clear and easy-to-follow call-to-action. This helps improve the target’s impression and ability to convert.

How much does it cost?

Facebook Boosts start at $1 and increasingly scale to the reach and results you request. So it can be economically efficient or expensive, based on your input.

The cost of boosting your post is tied to your audience reach. The larger the number of people you target, the greater the cost. This means you will pay more if you want your post to reach 5000 people as compared to 1000. However, often, you don’t need to invest more than $100 to target everyone in your location.

This is where understanding your key audience matters. Facebook provides lots of metrics to help you identify your ideal audience down to their age and location. This way, you have a smaller pool to work with (people that are most likely interested in what you have to offer) and can start testing your post-performance with as low as a $20 investment weekly.

Another thing to take note of while boosting your page is how to set goals to affect how you're charged. If you set your post promotion goal to impression/engagement (likes, shares, and comments), Facebook will charge you based on this performance. Again, likes are nice, but they don't necessarily mean you'll be booking more appointments.

To get the most out of your boosted post, set the post-performance indicator to be link clicks or calls, depending on your business goal for the post. These types of engagements lead to new patient consults and drive traffic to your website.

How effective is a Post Boost?

Now, whether Post boost holds the answers to your long-awaited Facebook efforts lies on how effective Facebook is as a platform, and if there is a simpler and better alternative.

Recently, Facebook has reduced the effectiveness of organic reach by 5.2%. This means it is harder for people to discover your page or posts, including those who already follow and like your page. But that’s not all. As Facebook Ad VP, Brian Bouland said, “the average user has over 1,500 stories from friends, family, acquaintances, and businesses battling for space on their newsfeed each time they log in. This can increase to 15,000 if the person is popular.”

Expressly, this means regardless of how you optimize your post or strategically time your posting, only a fraction of your followers will see your posts. To ensure they don’t miss out on anything, Facebook post boost is the easier, faster, and effective solution.

As a marketing platform, Facebook can push your paid post or ad to over 2.14 billion users if you require it. But more than that, it will place it between the first two to five posts of the user’s newsfeed, beating the 1490+ stories loading up behind yours.