Our ninth installment of Social Media Best Practices touches on putting money behind your organic posts and why boosting posts is well worth the investment. If you missed Best Practice #8: “Play by Facebook’s rules,” click here.
A hybrid paid and organic approach
Unfortunately, organic post reach is severely limited. Facebook will not be serving your content to very many people unless you spend a little bit of money to ‘boost’ it. If your organization values Facebook as a primary communications channel, it’s worth fighting for at least $500 a month to spread across ‘boosting’ important posts. This money can be applied to posts that achieve some standard of ‘good’ performance after 24 hours, so money isn’t wasted on content that isn’t resonating with your community.
But boosting posts is often considered an aspect of organic content strategy. The real grit of paid strategy comes along with the campaigns created within Ads Manager. These ads never get posted on your Page’s timeline. Ideally, your strategy for these campaign ads will complement and elevate the daily work you maintain with an editorial calendar of regular organic (and boosted) posts. If the goal of your paid strategy is to reach new audiences and drive engagement, you will want to make sure the topics and tone are similar to the content they will find on your public Page.
For this reason, it’s a good idea to maintain an evergreen campaign spending $5/day to find new followers for your Page with the campaign objective for ‘New Followers.’ Any large ad campaign can easily carve out this tiny allotment of $150/month to contribute toward the health and reach of your organic content. An investment in your audience size can pay off later when advertising to “Followers of my Page and their Friends.” We know followers of your Page (and their friends) are much more likely to be interested in your messaging than the general public.
