Does Boosting a Facebook Post Work?

Okay, I have to say right off the bat that this experiment was a spur of the moment event. And the results that I got are, rather dismal. I also made a couple of rather elementary mistakes as you will discover in the rest of this article. In any case, my hope is that I will be able to help you answer the question; “Does boosting a Facebook post work?”

The Results

Budget	Number Promised	Number reached	Clicks	Liked
$3	1500	141	3	1

As you can see in the above table, my results were rather dismal. Facebook had promised that the boosted post would reach 1500 people. However, it only managed to reach 141. That resulted in a lowly 3 clicks which, at a budget of $3, translates into a dollar per click.

The amazing thing is that someone actually likely my post well enough to, well, like it. I don’t know whether or not that person is among the three who clicked on the link. In all probability, it was just someone who liked the title.

The Post

The post that I boosted as part of this experiment has the rather corny title; “The backlinks maniacs are on the prowl.” It covers the issue of backlinks in Search Engine Optimization.

If you have been following developments within the sector, you will have noticed how backlinks have become something of an obsession. Indeed, there are companies out there that sell the things.

All this is because Search Engines, including Google, decided a while back to put so much stock in backlinks as a sign of a web page’s authority.

How it all began

A few days ago, Facebook started pestering me; asking me to boost one of my articles. Although I had previously received similar pleas from the Social Media behemoth, I decided to oblige this time around. The whole thing would cost me $3, so, what was there to lose? Dangled in front of me was the promise of reaching up to 1500 people.

Practical Heaven

Now, I am a new blogger and have, like so many others before me, been struggling to generate traffic. My greatest enemy is, again as many others have found out before me, the issue of Domain authority. My site still has very little of that.

It takes so much time for new websites to begin to really get visible that the whole venture sometimes appears to be rather pointless. That is the reason why up to 95% of all beginner bloggers soon give up.

Building Domain Authority

Giving your site greater visibility is simple enough. Or so you are told. All that you need to do is write a few great articles, write a few guest posts and you will be done. Well, as I mention in one of my articles, guest posting is really overrated. In fact, the stock that Search Engines put on backlinks is rather misplaced, considering the many black-hat link-building methods that are going on out there.

The Facebook Post Boosting Experiment

After being pestered by Facebook, I decided to boost one of my articles from this blog. My budget was only $3 and there was the promise, as I have already stated, of reaching over 1500 people.

Getting Set Up

How you go about boosting a Facebook Post is, I suppose, a story for another day. Needless to say here that its easy to do. I did make a couple of elementary mistakes, which goes some way in explaining my rather dismal results.

Does boosting a Facebook post work? My Mistakes

I made a couple of, as I have already mentioned, rather elementary mistakes during the process of boosting my post on Facebook. Here are a few of them;

• I did not target a specific demographic group (I wasn’t aware that I could)
• My budget was, perhaps, a tad too low
• The chosen article was, perhaps, too specialized

Should you boost a Facebook Post

The verdict is still out there on that one. There are thousands of people who will tell you that doing so really is a waste of time and resources. You are, they say, better off creating an actual advertisement. I do suppose that boosting a post could be helpful, particularly if you have written on some catchy topic.

In any case, this experiment will continue in a few days. I will boost another of my posts (perhaps even this one) and will wait to find out how, with proper targeting, the results can be made a bit more respectable. So, I will not draw conclusions with this one test.

A good way to gain traffic

The truth of the matter is that Social Media offers one of your best bets at generating traffic for your website. That is particularly the case if you are just starting out. Organic traffic, as we have already noted, only begins to trickle in after more than 6 months on the job. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other platforms can act as a bridge between now and then. However, you need to use the right Marketing tools on these platforms. So, does boosting a Facebook post work? The jury is still out there but the results look rather dismal.