By Judy Sanderson, NENA Director
Director, Vocational Services
Granite State Independent Living
In this incredible age of social media, most ENs are using it to promote their organizations as much as possible. It is important, with limited time and money, to get the most out of what you are doing. For that reason, we want to pass along two ways to get more out of your business Facebook page for relatively small costs.
These two ways are to 1) Actually post ads on Facebook; and 2) Boost a Facebook posting to specific audiences you may not otherwise reach. This article will provide an overview and actual links to where you can get the specific details to implement either or both.
First, a word about PII and Facebook: Make sure your Facebook is set so that other people cannot post to your page to avoid possible PII violations.
There are a number of reasons to pay for an ad or boost a post on Facebook. One is that there are 1.49 billion Facebook members (who click on the ads 22 billion times a year). You can target specific areas and people and the cost is reasonable.
Posting Ads on Facebook:
You can create a paid ad on Facebook using Facebook’s Ads Manager.
Once you log in to this page, you’ll see a performance dashboard where all your campaigns will be listed, including the results they’ve driven for your Facebook page. Unless you’ve already created an ad for your Facebook page, this dashboard will be empty.
To create a new campaign, tab over to the type of ad you want to create and click the green “Create” button to far left of these ad types. Ads Manager will prompt you to choose an objective for your campaign.
Your next step is to configure your target audience. Facebook’s targeting criteria are accompanied by an audience definition gauge. This tool—located to the right of the audience targeting fields—takes all of your selected properties into consideration in order to come up with a potential reach number.
Then comes the budget. Facebook allows you to set either a daily budget or a lifetime budget. Here’s how they differ from each other:
Daily budget. This is set to run continuously throughout the day. Using a daily budget means that Facebook will pace your spending per day. The minimum daily budget for an ad set is $1.00 USD.
Lifetime budget. If you’re looking to run your ad for a specified length of time, select a lifetime budget. This means Facebook will pace your spending over the time period you set for the ad to run.
There will also be information on scheduling, optimization, pricing and some delivery options.
Finally, you will get to create your ad. What it looks like will depend on your original objective. This option is broken down into two formats: Links and Carousels. Essentially, this means that you can either display a single image ad (Links) or a multi-image ad (Carousel) with three to five scrolling images at no additional cost.
Some Recent Articles to Help You with the Nuts & Bolts of Advertising:
Advertise on Facebook
Facebook Paid Ad Checklist
How to Advertise on Facebook
Boosting Existing Posts:
The second way to use Facebook is to boost already existing posts to specific audiences. This only works if you have a business Facebook page. This allows you to choose a specific post that you want to get out to those who may not otherwise be following your page.
At the bottom right-hand side of the post, you will see a button that says, “boost post.” Click on that and it automatically gives you options of choosing your audience, total budget, duration, and payment method. You can use their recommended audience options or choose your own. Criteria such as zip code, age-range and others can be used. Once you have made your choices, you select “Boost” and your post will show up on the Facebook pages of the audience you selected. People who otherwise don’t follow you could be seeing positive stories about your agency, services, successes and more. The cost will depend on the size of the audience and duration of the ad. It can be less than $10-15.
Click here for step-by-step directions for boosting.
