Sometimes when a post is performing a bit better than others in your feed, Instagram will prompt you to promote the post. This is the equivalent to boosting a post on Facebook and is a form of paid advertising. If you do it the right way and have your page set up for success, it can be helpful. If you do it the wrong way, you’ll end up wasting money on spam accounts liking your post.
What are the benefits of promoting a post?
The greatest benefit of promoting a post is the increased reach. You are essentially paying Instagram to increase your reach for you. Ideally, reaching the right people will get them to your page and stick around to become followers. It’s provides brand awareness and gives your post an extra boost. If you’ve been curious to try paid advertising, it’s a nice way to get your feet wet without having to learn Ads Manager which is a whole different ball game.
What kind of post should you boost?
Just because Instagram tells you a post is promotion-worthy doesn’t mean you should do it. Consider this…if there was one post that was going to be shown to a stadium full of people and this was your ONE shot to get them as followers, what post would you share? There are only two types of content I think are worthy of this: educational or inspirational content. Out of those two options, educational will outperform inspirational. Educational establishes you as an expert and encourages people to follow for more helpful content. Inspirational is more fleeting. They might like the quote but won’t stick around for the long term. This promotion-worthy post needs to have a clear purpose and give a glimpse into what your whole page is about (aka niche). Ideally, an educational carousel post with a CTA to “link in bio” on the last slide is best.
The wrong way
As I mentioned above, there is a wrong way to do promote a post that will lead to wasting money on spam accounts.
- Too broad of targeting (this is HUGE)
- Using a post that doesn’t educate or represent your page well (see above)
- Not having a link in your bio to capture leads
- Hot mess of content on your page that causes confusion on who you serve
- Unclear bio on your page
The right way
The right way of promoting a post is basically doing the opposite of everything listed above. Let’s go into more detail.
When it comes to targeting, you want to be specific. It’s tempting to see a number like 3,000,000 people and think the bigger the better, but the opposite is true. You’ll be spending money reaching the wrong kind of people if you keep things super broad. Write a list of characteristics about your ideal followers and use that as keywords for targeting. Make sure to also target by country. I aim for to 100,000 – 500,000 people.
Your bio should clearly state who you are, who you serve, and how you serve them. Take out the fluff! Have a clear call-to-action that points to the link in your bio to capture emails. Offer something of value like a free guide, free templates, free quiz, etc. Additionally, clean up your feed. If you have posts that don’t fit your current vibe, archive them.
What about budget?
The problem with budget questions is that is all relative to YOU. You ultimately decide what your budget is. If you want to spend $1 per day for 30 days? Great. $10 per day for 15 days? $100 per day for 100 days? You do you. The biggest thing here is that you need to have realistic expectations depending on what budget you decide on. You won’t get $1,000 results with a $30 budget.
Want to talk about promoting posts in more detail? Join me in the Resource Room on Facebook.