Facebook is a busy place. Feeds are full of birthday wishes, photos of the new babies, political rants, and updates of every conceivable sort. The posts coming from your practice page can get lost in all the traffic. But there’s a way to guarantee a better chance of your posts being seen by your target audience — boost them.
Boosting your Facebook posts guarantees a degree of visibility for posts you deem worthy of some extra attention. It’s easy to do and, while it will cost a few dollars, it can be worth it to make sure certain posts have a better chance of getting through the clutter.
What is a boosted post?
When you make a post onto your practice’s Facebook page, it joins the cacophony on the news feeds of those who like your page. Facebook’s all-knowing, all-seeing, all-deciding algorithms choose which posts get precedence coming into those feeds. Recently, the company noted that, in order to make sure people see more of the personal content (i.e. baby photos, anniversaries, new puppy photos, and the like) from their friends, it would downplay the ascendance of commercial posts. Why? Because Facebook wants its users on their pages as much as possible, and if they don’t see the post from their BFF from high school, they get irritated.
So, it’s a busy world out there in the news feed and those posts about your new procedures or happy patients can get lost in the din. Boosting them gives you better odds of being seen.
Boosted posts appear higher in the news feed. You can boost most of the posts you create on your practice page including updates, photos, videos, and offers. Your audience can see your posts without boosting, but boosting them increases the frequency they appear in news feeds and with it the likelihood that your audience will see them.
How do I boost a post?
Here’s how you do it. Create a post. Maybe it’s a new surgeon on staff, maybe a new procedure you’re offering, maybe a special. Now hit the Boost button in the lower right corner of the window. An overlay window will come up for you to make some decisions.
First, pick your audience. It defaults to “People who like your Page,” but you can change that to “People who like your Page and their friends” or you can create a new audience. If you do that you select gender, age, interests, and locations.
Now you decide your budget. You decide how much money you want to spend to boost your post. If you click on the pulldown arrow, you’ll see audience estimates based on how much you spend. Minimum budget is $1.00 per day.
Then you’ll decide how long the money you allocated will be spent by choosing the duration. You can click on stock options, or dictate the exact date the boosted post will run until.
The final step is how you’ll pay for your boosted post.
OK, I boosted it. So who will see it now?
You selected your audience. You chose between people who like your page, those people and their friends, or people you choose through targeting. When you click on the Insights tab at the top of your page, and then into Promotions you can see all of the promotions you’ve created for your practice page and manage them.
At the bottom, you’ll also see the total number of unique people who have seen your most recent boosted post. If you hover over or click this number it will then be broken down by organic reach and paid reach (the extras you hit with your boost).
Want to be sure a post is seen? Boost it.
Bottom line here is that two things are working against a post from your practice’s Facebook page being seen by the people you want it to see it. First, Facebook has decided to downplay commercial (your post type) posts coming into people’s news feeds, opting instead to elevate baby photos from your high school’s homecoming queen. Second, there is just a ton of noise crossing everyone’s news feed, and you may not be seen (even if you do get onto the feed of those you want organically).
To better your odds, we believe boosting the posts you think have real value to your target audience is well worth it. For as little at $10 you can really increase your reach. And then if someone sees that you now offer Cellfina, for instance, and shares your post with a friend of hers, the word will spread even further.
As always, even if we don’t handle your practice Facebook page we’re always available to at least answer questions you have about it. If we do handle it, odds are we’re boosting certain posts. Either way, if you have questions, simply contact your MyAdvice representative and ask away.
