Instagram is an undeniable tool for small businesses and personal brands alike.
As one of the top 4 social media platforms in the world, Instagram is perfect for showcasing your personality, advertising products, and connecting with your niche audience. There’s a lot you can accomplish without spending a dime on Instagram, but that’s not the only way to achieve success.
In this post, we’re going to discuss the value of boosting an Instagram post. If you’ve never tried it before, we’ll tell you how to boost a post effectively, what you need to consider when you do it, and what the results might look like.
By investing in paid Instagram advertising, you can widen your overall reach and better appeal to the right audience. Whether you’re focused on posts, stories, or reels, boosting can have a massive effect. Keep reading and learn how to do it the right way.
How to Boost an Instagram Post
If you’ve got an Instagram business account, you can boost your posts in just a few clicks. If you don’t have a business account, getting one is also very easy.
Go into your account and tap the 3 dashes in the upper right-hand corner, go into settings, and tap “Switch to Professional Account”. Select a category for your business, tap “Ok”, “Business”, and “Next”, where you’ll enter contact details (or skip this step).
Once you’ve got your business account, you can boost a post by going into “Promotions”, then tapping “Create Promotion”. Search through your previous posts to find the one you want to boost, then tap the “Promote” button displayed underneath the picture or video.
On this screen, you’ll be able to select the details for your promotion. For boosting posts, Instagram allows you to choose your target audience (age range, gender, location), budget, and duration.
After you’re done crafting your promotion, you click “Create Promotion”. It’ll then go into a review period, where Instagram ensures that it adheres to its guidelines – they say this takes up to a day, but it’s usually a few hours. After this, the promotion is live.
What Are the Benefits of Boosting a Post?
Why pay to boost a post when you can simply post for free and try to promote it on your own, you might ask? There are several benefits to these paid promotions.
Increase Brand Awareness
The most obvious reason why you’d boost a post is to reach more people. As a business, you’re always trying to broaden your audience. Boosting puts your content in front of eyes that wouldn’t necessarily find it otherwise.
It’s an especially effective method when you’re just starting out and you need to find followers/leads/customers. If you’ve already got a good base of followers, you can let Instagram generate its own audience for your promotion based on your existing followers, which can be very effective as well.
Boost Engagement
We all know how important engagement is for success on social media. Likes, comments, and shares all help to algorithmically grow your Instagram profile in an organic way.
Ultimately, you want your followers to have a legitimate interest in your business and products. Putting an emphasis on this organic growth will ensure that your growth on Instagram actually translates to business growth.
Bring People to Your Site
Boosted posts can be effective for getting people to your business website. As long as you’ve included a link in the original post, you can track the number of people that click it. In this way, your Instagram posts can become an effective and measurable part of your digital marketing efforts.
Analytics
Speaking of measurability, every boosted Instagram post comes back with data on its overall performance. Having this information allows you to see what’s working and what isn’t, so you can adjust your future posts to perform better each time.
How Much Should You Invest?
When you boost an Instagram post, there’s always the question of how much you should spend. One of the great things about this method is that you can set a maximum daily spend amount.
If you set up a draft campaign, you can look at your audience definition and estimate daily results based on different spending amounts. Usually, the more you spend per day, the more people you’ll be estimated to reach.
You can also adjust most of the details of the campaign on the fly. If you feel like you should spend more or increase the age range of your audience, you can go in and do that without much hassle.
Is Boosting an Instagram Post Really Worth It?
A lot of people wonder if boosting a post is worth it when there are such powerful ways to reach audiences with Instagram Ads. It’s true that Facebook Ads Manager gives you much more control over the details of an advertising campaign than a boosted post.
That said, the process of boosting a post comes at a much lower cost and if you’re doing it for the right reasons, you can see results. It also takes a few minutes versus a full-on ad campaign that might take a few hours to set up properly.
There are other alternatives to boosting posts as well. If you’re looking specifically for more followers or likes on your posts, there are helpful tools that deliver more concrete results. Check out stormlikes.com, which is a service that will get you hundreds more likes on any post that you wish to create more awareness around.
Using Instagram for Your Business
Now that you know a bit more about the value of boosting an Instagram post, you can decide whether or not to do it. There’s no denying the value of Instagram for brand building and engaging with your audience. Whether or not you want to invest money to promote a post or work the algorithm organically is up to you.
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