This Simple Boosted Facebook Post Got Over 500 Shares. Here’s Why...

Blog Tyrant is a pretty popular blog about — you guessed it — blogging.

And from time to time, they'll boost one of their posts on Facebook to try and expand their reach a bit.

They'd had mixed results in the past, but recently, one of their writers decided to try a different approach.

The boosted post ended up with over 500 shares, which is a lot more than most of their boosted posts were getting.

So other than having good content, what did they do right?

One factor was the budget, which was higher than usual.

But that's not the whole story. The post's success really comes down to smart audience targeting, made possible by some clever out-of-the-box thinking.

They specifically targeted audiences who listened to a particular podcast.

Why?

Because they noticed that on that podcast, Squarespace and other blog creation services advertise regularly.

So that implied that the podcast's audience was already known to be interested in blogging.

It was actually a pretty surprising and unexpected audience overlap, since it was an NPR podcast that was mostly news and current events.

It wasn't something where it would be super obvious that the audience would be interested in starting blogs.

But it worked really, really well. Blog Tyrant ended up with tons of engagement.

Here's a more detailed rundown of what they did to get such great results.

Targeting audiences that are already interested works well

One thing I did was target audiences that I know are already interested in the idea of starting a blog or a website as I thought it might make it a little less difficult to convert them to the idea of subscribing or reading a long-form piece of content.

For example, one thing I tried was targeting the audiences of NPR podcasts as I know that Squarespace and other blogging platforms do a bit of advertising there. I had hoped that meant that their level of blogging education and knowledge was already quite high.

Don’t just direct target your exact keywords, think about other places on and offline where people might be encountering your topic or might be at least open to it down the track. This can lead to some better targeted promotions.

The traffic acquired was decent

One of the surprising things I learned was that the traffic acquired through the promotion was pretty decent once they had clicked through to the blog. Have a look.

[image source: Blog Tyrant]

For example, the average time on site of over three minutes is quite good and probably means that the targeted audience matches up quite well to the content.

You can also see that the bounce rate is slightly better than the average of the site.