How to Boost a Facebook Post to Target Audience

Boosting a post is one of the quickest ways to get your best content in front of a new, targeted audience on Facebook. But simply clicking Boost Post and throwing money at it won't get you the results you need. This guide breaks down exactly how to define your audience, set the right goal, and spend your budget wisely to turn a simple boost into a powerful marketing tool.

First, Why Should You Boost a Facebook Post?

In the early days of Facebook, nearly everyone who followed your Page saw your posts. Today, organic reach - the number of people who see your content without you paying for it - is incredibly low, often dipping into the single-digit percentages. Facebook's algorithm prioritizes posts from friends and family, meaning your brand’s content has to fight incredibly hard to appear in your followers' feeds, let alone reach non-followers.

Boosting a post solves this problem. It’s a form of paid advertising that lets you:

• Reach Beyond Your Followers: Get your message in front of people who haven't heard of you yet but are likely interested in what you do.
• Micro-Target Your Ideal Customer: Pinpoint users based on their location, age, interests, and online behaviors.
• Drive Specific Actions: Push people to visit your website, send you a message, or sign up for your newsletter.
• Gather Valuable Data: Learn which messages and topics resonate most with different audience segments, helping you refine your entire content strategy.

Think of it not just as paying for likes, but as a strategic investment to connect with the right people at the right time. For a broader understanding of paid strategies, learn how to run Facebook ads effectively.

How to Select the Perfect Post for a Boost

Not every post deserves a budget. A weak post won’t perform well just because you put money behind it, in fact, you’ll just be paying to show mediocre content to more people. The best candidates for boosting are posts that are already performing well organically.

Look for posts in your feed with these characteristics:

• High Organic Engagement: If a post is already getting a good number of likes, comments, and shares from your current audience, it's a strong signal that it resonates. This is content that has proven its worth.
• Valuable and Helpful Content: Posts that solve a problem, answer a common question, or offer a unique tip are perfect for boosting. Think guides, tutorials, or data-driven insights. They provide immediate value, making a great first impression on a new audience.
• A Clear Purpose and Call-to-Action (CTA): Does the post have a point? Are you sending them to a new blog post, announcing a sale, or generating leads for a service? An effective boosted post gives the user something to do next.
• Strong Visuals: High-quality, eye-catching images or videos are non-negotiable. Your post will be competing for attention in a crowded feed, and a compelling visual is the first thing that will stop someone from scrolling.

Example: A local bakery posts a beautifully shot video of a baker decorating a new seasonal cake. It gets twice the usual number of comments from their followers. This is a perfect post to boost to a local audience interested in desserts and special events.

The Step-by-Step Guide to Boosting Your Post

Ready to get started? Let's walk through the process, paying special attention to the settings that make the biggest difference.

Step 1: Get Started and Choose Your Goal

Find the published post on your Facebook Page feed and click the blue "Boost post" button in the bottom-right corner. This will open the boost settings window.

Facebook will immediately ask you to pick a goal. This is the most important decision you'll make, as it tells the algorithm what you want to achieve. Don't leave it on "Automatic." Be intentional.

Common goals include:

• Get more messages: This encourages people to start a conversation with you via Messenger. It's excellent for businesses that rely on consultations, quotes, or personalized customer service. For instance, a real estate agent could use this to field questions about a new listing.
• Get more engagement: Facebook will optimize to show your post to people most likely to react, comment, and share. Use this if your goal is brand awareness, building social proof, or starting a community conversation. Learn how to increase Facebook page engagement effectively.
• Get more website visitors: If your post links to a blog article, a product page, or a landing page, this is your goal. Facebook will favor showing your ad to people who have a history of clicking off-platform links.
• Get more video views: A straightforward goal for when you're promoting video content and want to maximize viewership.
• Get more leads: This opens an instant form on Facebook where users can submit their contact information without ever leaving the app. It’s a low-friction way to build an email list or a leads database. Discover more about how to generate leads on Facebook.

Pick the goal that most closely aligns with the purpose of your original post.

Step 2: Add a Call-to-Action Button

The "Button" feature adds a clickable call-to-action to your post, giving users a clear next step. The button you choose should match your goal. For instance:

• If your goal is website traffic to a blog post, use the "Learn More" button.
• If you're linking to a product page, use "Shop Now".
• If you're promoting an event, use "Book Now".
• If you want leads, use "Sign Up".

If you choose to get more messages, the button will automatically change to "Send Message." You can also create automated welcome messages and suggested questions to help guide the conversation in Messenger.

Step 3: Nailing Your Audience Targeting

This is where you make your money back. Don't stick with the default "People who like your Page and their friends." The real power of boosting is in reaching new, specific groups of people. Click on the pencil icon next to "Audience" to create a new one. For comprehensive strategies on reaching your desired demographic, explore how to target audience on Facebook Ads.

Here, you'll define your ideal customer by layering three types of targeting criteria:

1. Location Targeting

Where do your customers live? You can target by country, state, city, and even drop a pin and target a specific mile radius around a point - perfect for local businesses like restaurants, salons, or retail stores. An e-commerce brand might target entire countries they ship to, while a local coffee shop would target just a few miles around their address.

2. Demographic Targeting

This includes two basic but important options:

• Age: Select an age range that matches your typical customer. Avoid keeping it super broad (e.g., 18-65+). If your product is for new moms, a range of 25-40 might be more effective.
• Gender: Choose All, Men, or Women. Only specify this if your product or service is highly gender-specific.

3. Detailed Targeting (Interests, Behaviors & Demographics)

This is the most powerful part. Detailed Targeting lets you reach people based on what they're explicitly interested in, the Pages they like, their purchase behaviors, job titles, and more.

When you start typing in the search box, Facebook will suggest categories. Think about the following:

• Interests: What are your potential customers' hobbies? What magazines do they read? What brands do they love? If you're a travel company selling adventure tours, you might target interests like "hiking," "rock climbing," and "National Geographic."
• Behaviors: These are based on user activity on and off Facebook. You can target people based on their purchase behavior (e.g., "Engaged Shoppers"), device usage, or even if they're a Facebook Page admin.
• Demographics: Here you can get more detailed than just age and gender. You can target based on education level, life events (e.g., "Newly Engaged"), job titles, and industries. A B2B software company might target people with "Marketing Manager" as a job title.

Pro Tip: Don't just add one or two broad interests. Try layering 5-15 specific, related interests to build a well-defined audience. For instance, instead of just targeting "Fitness," a brand selling high-end athletic wear could target people interested in "CrossFit," "Peloton," "Fabletics," and "Whole Foods Market." This creates a more focused consumer profile.

Step 4: Set Your Duration and Budget

Next, you’ll define how long the boost runs and how much you want to spend.

• Duration: It's generally better to run a boost for at least 4-5 days. This gives Facebook's algorithm enough time to learn and find the best people within your target audience to show the post to. A one-day boost often doesn't give the system enough time to optimize.
• Total Budget: You can start small - even a $25-50 budget can generate meaningful results and data if your targeting is solid. As you enter a budget, Facebook’s "Estimated daily results" panel will update, giving you a rough idea of how many people you can expect to reach each day. This is just an estimate, but it's a helpful sanity check.

Step 5: Review Placements and Payment

By default, Facebook will automatically run your boosted post across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. For a straightforward boost, this is usually fine. If you know your audience is primarily on one platform, you can uncheck the others.

Finally, confirm your payment method. Once you do, hit the "Boost post now" button at the bottom.

Monitor and Learn from Your Results

Boosting isn't a "set it and forget it" task. Once your promotion is live (it can take a few minutes to a few hours to be approved), you can click "View Insights" on the post to track its performance. To dive deeper into understanding the effectiveness of your campaigns, learn how to analyze Facebook ad performance.

Look at key metrics related to your goal:

• Reach: How many unique people did the post reach?
• Engagement: How many likes, comments, shares, and clicks did it get?
• Cost per Result: If your goal was link clicks, what was the cost per click? This tells you how efficient your budget is.

The data you'll get from even a small boost will be invaluable. Maybe you'll discover that an audience you thought would be perfect didn't respond, while another audience loved it. Use these learnings to inform both your content strategy and future boosting decisions.

Final Thoughts

Boosting a Facebook post is a powerful way to cut through the noise and connect with people most likely to love what you offer. By choosing the right post, setting a clear goal, and carefully defining your target audience, you can turn a small investment into significant engagement, website traffic, and growth.

Here at Postbase, we believe in using a visual planner and analytics to identify high-performing content. When you can easily see what’s resonating organically with your followers, you’ll know exactly which posts are worth putting a real budget behind.