The Facebook Booster Shot and My Secret Sauce: Lookalike Audiences

Whether you’re new to the Facebook Ad game or just getting started, I have news: You’re in for a ride. For many of us, creating facebook ads is like leaving the towel across the bathroom after showering – out of reach and impossible to not make a mess. Good news is we’re here to help make your facebook ad life easier. Bad news is no matter how tiny you try to make your steps to the towel, you’re going to make a huge puddle.

Now that that’s behind us, let’s go get you your Facebook “booster shot!”

First and foremost, it’s important to identify “the why” behind your facebook ads – do you want to drive awareness to your page? Get more likes? Drive traffic? Convert sales?

While all are probably on your “to do” list, Facebook boosts are great if you want to drive awareness to your page and/or get more likes. According to the Facebook gurus, “boosting posts is a great option if your goal is to increase engagement with your audience and get people interacting with the content you share on Facebook and Instagram.”

That said, a few weeks ago, I walked you through a simple trick on “how to know when to post on facebook.” Here’s a reminder:

1. Open up your business page on Facebook. On the top of the page you’ll see a list of tabs (Page, Messages, Notifications, Insights, Publishing Tools).
2. Click on “Insights.” and you’ll see “Overview” on the left side of your screen.
3. Below “Overview” is the tab, “Posts.” Click that bad-boy.

On the “Posts” page scroll down to “All Posts Published.” In this section, you’ll see all your posts as well as the “Reach,” “Engagement” and the option to promote or “Boost Post.” Quick note on “Reach:”

While “Reach” is important (and a nice confidence boost), the “Engagement” metric is what you want to pay attention to. Why? Reach really just means how many people scrolled through and saw your post in their newsfeed. Engagement is how many people actually “stopped to stare” and well, engaged.

That said, click on “Engagement” and you’ll see the option to click on “Post clicks” – this will bring all your most engaged posts to the top. For the purpose of this tip, only pay attention to the most engaged posts that link back to your brand or website. (In other words, disregard the really popular, hyper-clicked post where you shared Brené Brown’s TED talk on Vulnerability and focus on the most-engaged post where you shared a link to your website on a special promotion).

What I love about boosting is that it’s like the training wheels for “Promoted Facebook Ads” (we’ll get to that in another post). You already know the content you are boosting works because your fans engaged with it. So chances are, the same content will work well for future customers that you’re about to target when you boost the post.

Right when you click “boost post,” you’ll first be prompted to choose your audience. If you decide to click “choose through targeting,” click “Edit” right next door, and here you can choose the exact audience you want to target (i.e. narrow down to your audience’s gender, age, location, interests,activities, etc.).

However, because I love you, I want to share my secret sauce: “Lookalike Audiences.”

A lookalike audience is exactly how it sounds – it is a group of people that look exactly like the audience you already have but you haven’t reached yet and “would be interested in your business because they’re similar to people who already are.”

To create a lookalike audience, the Facebook Team put together a step-by-step walk through of the process that can be found here. Stay tuned for more on lookalike audiences, but for now –

Happy boosting!