Promote Your Alumni Chapter’s Events by Boosting Facebook Posts

It’s almost football season and if you’re like many alumni clubs around the country, that means game watches. Your social media platforms can be instrumental in getting the word out about your upcoming events. Facebook gives you several ways that you can promote those events if you have a little bit of a budget. This is a meaty topic and I want to give you good instructions so in this first post we’ll take a look at how to boost a post.

Boost a Facebook Post

One of the easiest ways to promote an event (or anything really) is simply to boost the Facebook post. Boosting a post simply means to take an existing post, throw a little money and targeting behind it and promote it across Facebook. Boosting is available on a Facebook Page (but not a Group page). This takes just a minute and uses an existing post or event or one that you “whip up” just to boost.

Requirement: you will need to setup a Facebook Ad account.

1. Select the post on your page to boost. Click the Boost Post button. The Boost Post pop-up box appears.

2. By default the Objective (of the boost) is pre-selected to encourage people to visit your website. You can change the objective by clicking the Change link to the right.

3. Facebook will include a button on the boosted post so people can go to your Facebook page for more info. That button defaults to Learn More but it can be changed by clicking on the arrow next to Learn More and selecting a different button. This is optional.

3. Maximize the reach of your boosted post by targeting the audience that will see it. You can get really creative with different types of data. I tend to just select People who like your Page and their friends since that will likely reach my alumni and anyone they are friends with who may also be alumni or fans.

4. If your Instagram page is linked to your Facebook page, the Run promotion on Instagram checkbox is automatically checked. Maximize your reach and promotion dollars by making sure your boosted posts run in both places!

Note: You can see what the post will look like on a Facebook desktop, mobile device or in Instagram.

5. Set your budget and duration by making a selection or entering the dollar amount of your Total Budget. The dollar amount will help to derive the Estimated People Reached number and can help you to plan your promotion spending.

6. Select the number of days to run the promotion by clicking on 1 Day, 7 Days or 14 Days or enter a date in the Run this ad until box.

7. Facebook will automatically charge the credit card associated with the Facebook Ad account or you can enter the credit card number in the Payment section. Facebook sends an invoice for ads once a month.

8. Click Boost to accept the Facebook Terms & Conditions of the ad and to start the promotion.

Note: Facebook does an automated review of every ad submitted. You will receive a notification indicating that the ad will become active once this review has been completed.

People in your target audience will begin seeing the sponsored ad.

Boosting posts is a quick way to get started with Facebook Ads. In my next post, we’ll learn how to create an using Facebook’s Ad Manager.