As we move out of our SEO focus on the blog, we’ll look now to social media. Facebook, the most popular social networking site for many years now, is a must-have tool in today’s social media marketing age. But having a page with no, or very few, followers isn’t an effective way to market. With figuring out new ways to help clients gain a further reach in mind, we decided to test out a new Facebook feature: the status boost.

Status updates primarily only reach the news feeds of people and other businesses that follow your page, making it difficult to gain new followers or have new people notice your brand. Facebook’s new status boost feature, however, allows you to promote a status and literally boost its reach beyond your immediate followers.

How to Promote a Status

Promoting a Facebook status is a very simple process. On your company’s timeline, each status you post should have a box in the bottom right corner that either says “Boost Post” or “Promote Post.”

When you have decided which post you would like to promote, click the “Boost Post” button on that post. You will then be able to choose your budget for the promotion, usually from $5 to $100. Once you have chosen your budget, you will then be prompted to enter your credit card information and begin your promotion.

This is a paid service, of course, but we thought, for the money, it could be an effective way to increase the reach of our own company page. And so the experiment began.

For our first status boost, we decided to promote our Private Duty Business Manual, one of the products on our Home Care Agency Marketplace site. For the low one-time price of $5.00 (the minimum price for a status boost), we promoted the post at 7 PM on April 25th. According to Facebook, the ad was estimated to run through Sunday with an estimated reach of  2600 – 4800, meaning our little status could reach between 2370 – 4570 people outside the ones who already follow us on Facebook. (Not a bad deal for five bucks!)

We tried a second status boost the next Monday, May 15th, to see how a boosted status would do when promoted earlier in the work week. This status promoted an upcoming social media webinar in our Marketing Aging Care series. This time around, we upped the ante, spending $10.00 for an estimated reach of 3400 – 6200 people. Again, it sounded like a good amount of bang for very little buck!

How did we do? Did we get the results we were looking for? Tune in next week when we’ll have the results of our Facebook status boost experiment. And while you’re waiting, why not check us out on Facebook?