How To Boost Posts On Instagram For Musicians (and should you do it?)

In this video, I'm going to show you how you can run ads on your existing posts on Instagram, whether you want more views or more comments or more likes or more followers on your Instagram profile. And this actually applies exactly the same for Facebook as well. Uh you're going to learn how to do that in this video along with different ways to do it that are better or worse in different situations. But before we dive into that, I want to just preface this that by saying that for the most part when I'm running ads on meta ads, Instagram, Facebook ads or or whatever platform, typically I like to make sure all the ads I'm running are sending people off platform, not keeping them on platform. And the reason is my methodology is if you want to grow on social media, I I think you should try to do it organically. Uh because you're you really are posting on social media to grow an audience that then you can use to send places. you're not usually spending money to grow on that platform. You're typically spending money to take people off the platform. Uh secondly, the reason for that is you if you aren't actually posting and making good content, typically your ads aren't going to work well for this type of thing anyways and if you spend money to gain followers, if you're not posting and making content that people are enjoying, what are you going to do with these followers anyways, right? Are they going to actually even stick around uh if your content is not good and it's not attracting them in the first place? So that mean are they going to enjoy it once they're actually following you? So before you dive into this, I would consider that there are plenty of great reasons to to run ads to boost content, use existing post ads ads just to get benefits, but like try not to use this as an entire crutch to justify skipping organic content is really what I'm getting at. So there's a few ways to do this. I've mentioned I'm going to show you a couple different ways that you can you can essentially boost posts or run ads on your existing content. One of which, of course, is just on Instagram. you can boost a post. Now, if you're using an iPhone, you will have to pay an app store fee, right? I don't know if this is the same on Android yet, but if you try to boost a post post from your phone on on Instagram on an iPhone, you'll have to pay 20% app store fee to Apple. So, don't boost post on your phone. Uh there's no reason to pay that extra fee on top of your ad spend. So, we want to do is just go to instagram.com. Um, which you might actually even be able to also do from your phone, but you can just do it from a computer. Um, and you can boost post here. Now, there are downsides to this, right? If you go and click boost post, you can't do everything that you can do in Meta Ads Manager, which Meta Ads Manager is a very sophisticated platform with a ton of control and a million options. But there's one type of campaign that I I often see people running in boost mode instead of the other instead of like full-blown ads manager. And that mode is if you're trying to run a a profile visit campaign or Instagram profile visit campaign. I found this just works better for many people, not everyone, but for many people when they run it through the actual Instagram boost mode. So, for example, if I go through here through meta ads manager, I can create a campaign, I can do traffic, and it allows me to do this Instagram profile visit objective that you can see down here, Instagram profile visits. And that works, but a lot of people that I've I know have found that for some reason it just works better when you do it through boost mode. And when you do it through boost mode, you get to choose who should see your ad, suggested audience, target this audience, people similar to your followers. And if you have a lot of followers, by a lot, I just mean like a couple thousand. So nothing like crazy. You don't need like a hundred thousand or something. Just a few thousand followers you've acquired organically, it'll actually do a very good job of finding people who are interested in your profile, and you'll get a good amount of followers. Keep in mind, not every campaign will work well. Some ads might do better or worse, but this is actually a pretty good option if you're just trying to grow followers. So that's how you do the boost mode. You just go on the website and click boost and choose Instagram profile list. I wouldn't run any other type of campaign through boost mode. I would do it through ads manager. But let's say you did want to run the Instagram profile visits through ads manager as well because you get way more control and way more customization. Um, as I was showing you before, you you come in, you click create, and you make a traffic campaign because it has that Instagram profile visits objective. And then we can click continue. Do manual objective. And you can name it. We could call this IG traffic. We can click next. And you'll see here, this is where you you turn this traffic campaign into an Instagram profile visit. So if I choose Instagram or Facebook as our conversion location, it's trying to maximize the number of Instagram profile visits. So that's like the objective the campaign is is optimizing for. It's going to try to get us as many Instagram profile visits as possible. Exactly the same setup that you had through boost mode, but now the benefit is you have the full control of ads manager. And I'm not going to harp in every single detail because I've made hundreds of videos about Facebook Ads Manager here. But but let's say for example, you know, we're going to switch to original audience options. And you want to say, I want to just run this in some very specific states or cities. You can do that in here. I want to run this to just those states and cities for people who are between the ages of 18 and 40 because I know that's who most likely is going to come out to shows. Um, you can go in and instead of just adding one video that you're boosting, you could come in here and clone this and do multiple videos. So, I'll show you. If I go in down to um, actually, let me go back to here. I never selected the Facebook page that we're using. So, now that we have our page selected, I can go back to the ad and I can actually say that I want to um, instead of creating an ad, we're going to use an existing post. And then I can select a post and I can choose any page on the uh profile. Right? And so I could use this as an ad and then I could go ahead and duplicate that ad and then I could change the post and choose a different post. Right? So now I have two different posts and then I could do that again. Obviously you'd want to name these things or I'm just I'm keeping the name generic because I want to just keep this quick. But I have now have three different videos running in this singular Instagram profile visit campaign. And so, as I said, a lot of people get better results when they boost through the Instagram app. I've even tried doing things like lookalike audiences based on followers inside of a campaign and ads manager. And for some reason, the boosted version a lot of the times just seems to be kind of magical. So, this is how you could do it through the Instagram ads manager. So, you can see for yourself, but this approach is very similar to what we're going to do for a few other types of campaigns. So, if I come back out here, we're going to forget we ever did this. We're going to create a new campaign. There are two other campaigns that are kind of common if you wanted to boost post. Let's say you want to have a video and you want to have it get more views or similarly you have any type of post and you want to get more engagement on it. Well, if I click this engagement campaign, this is the objective I typically use for like streaming conversion campaigns like a Spotify promotion campaign because it can drive conversions. But through this objective, we can also do video views and post engagement which are the two we're going to do now. We're going to do it one, but I'll show you how to set it up for either or. So, if I click a new engagement campaign, you want manual here. And we can call this uh example engagement. You probably name this what your post is called, but then we can go in and just like before uh we're going to change our conversion location. And this is where we decide what type of campaign it is. So, it's our conversion location is happening on our ad here, right? Our ad is the conversion location. And the engagement type, we can flip between video views and post engagement. So essentially here it just depends what you want. Uh if you choose video views, it's going to maximize for through plays which is a 15-second video view. If you choose post engagement, it's going to maximize engagement with a post which it considers engagement likes, shares, swipes on a carousel, I think 3 second video views, comments. So it's very broad. Typically what happens is the video views are going to get you longer, more engaged video views. post engagement is going to get you more overall engagements. Typically, more likes, they had more comments and shares and and saves and all that stuff. Um, but the quality of the views is going to be less. So, basically, you you run either one of these and over time you might see one or the other works better for you. But it can also be custom depending on your goals. For example, if you're doing a ad on a picture, post engagement by far will crush because you can't do a video ad on a on a picture. But post engagement there's no 3-se secondond video views. So, basically, it's just getting a ton of likes. Um, and if you're using a video, then it can be either or. So, you're going to want to consider that. But let's say we're doing post engagement here. You could go and specify our budget. Let's say we're doing five a day. Or maybe we're doing a lifetime budget. Maybe you just want to do $15 on a certain post and you want that to run over the course of like I don't know, I think this like roughly a week could switch to original audience options. And then again now we have the full-blown control of ads manager where we can target any country we want. We can target any age range we want and we could go in we can specify that we want to target fans of metal core. And just like before you can go in and specify what your page is and then choose an existing post in a page and get it up and running. Now there are a few caveats to this. If I go back to the adset level here, if I go to placements, you don't want automatic here. You want manual, right? Because if you're running this and you want all the views and the engagement to show on your post, the ad can only run on the places where your post lives. So, let's say this was going to be an Instagram only, like it's an Instagram post you're boosting. Well, we only want to run this on Instagram. And really we only want it to run on Instagram feed explore and reels because on stories people it doesn't give like the full post right so they can't interact with it in the same way. Instagram feed explore and reels people can like they can share they can save they can comment and all that stuff. So on on stories and and stuff they can't but also on Facebook the engagement that people have with your video on Facebook won't show up on Instagram. So, if you're boosting something on Facebook, you want to make sure you only choose Facebook. If you're boosting something on Instagram, you want to make sure you only choose Instagram. So, be very careful about that. Otherwise, like you might find that you're getting all your engagement on Facebook, but using a post on Instagram and none of it showing up, which might for you defeat the purpose of running the ad in the first place, depending on what your goals are. This kind of brings a question, well, what if you want to do it on both? What if you want to do it on both Facebook and Instagram? Well, with this current setup, we have this ad set is effectively an Instagram only one, right? So, we're doing engagement on an Instagram post running on Instagram placements and it's $15 over the course of like a week. Now, here I would come in and I would choose the post. So, I'm not going to actually choose it. I'm just going to call this IG post. But since our budget is defined at the adset level, right, we're saying $15 for the lifetime of this. We can clone this. Click these three dots and quickly duplicate. And now we have a copy IG and IG copy. I can rename this to FB. I can scroll all the way down and switch this to just Facebook. We'll say Facebook feed and Facebook video feeds. Uh these are two places that people can fully engage with with video posts. I think reals Facebook reels might apply too. I'm not 100% positive on it, but I believe it does. Facebook reels is just a little bit on the newer side in terms of ad placements. But same deal here. Now I have the ad set set up for Facebook. So I can go into the ad under the Facebook one and do the same thing except here if I select post instead of choosing Instagram here I'm choosing Facebook. Right. So on this one I'm choosing a post on Facebook. Now I can name this FB post. But the Instagram one and I guess I will do it here. I'm doing the opposite. you want to Instagram and choose a post. I don't know why my Instagram posts aren't available here. I might have to relink my my account. Um, but you should see your post here and you would choose it. So, under the IG adset, you would choose your IG post and under the FB adset, you choose your FB post. And now we have a campaign that's promoting both the same post that you have on your Facebook and on your Instagram. And there's a bunch of different ways you can set this up. Like for example, I if you wanted to keep this as an evergreen thing that you can reuse over time, instead of choosing a lifetime budget, you could choose a daily budget. And let's say you you want to do $3 a day on Facebook and then you wanted to do three $3 a day on um Instagram. You could turn off these end dates. And so we have three bucks a day going to each of these platforms. But then what you could do is leave this running all the time. And then whenever you have a new post, you just clone this ad. Right? So if I back out here, this Instagram engagement campaign, I could come back into it at any time in the future and turn off the existing video, duplicate it, and then publish a new video. So I'm just adding ex new post over time to this ad. So the ad's always spending three a day. I'm just swapping in which videos on Facebook and Instagram that are getting added. And so if you're the type of person that you know for whatever reason you want to be continuously boosting content, uh this is how you do without having to build an entirely new campaign from scratch for both Facebook and Instagram for every single post you're doing because it can be very tedious if you're just boosting the occasional thing doing the singular campaign thing's cool. But you know if you do a couple dozen of these you'll start to realize that there must be a better way. And this is essentially the better way. Now there is one more use case of this setup of using existing posts to to get engagement. Let's say you're running a streaming campaign and you want to use post on your profile inside of the ad so that you're still using it for your campaign, but now you're getting the love on your Instagram post so that it just looks like all that activity that you're getting from the ads is actually stacking up on your profile. You can do that, too. Essentially, you just go to your existing campaign and you you go to one of your ads and you could clone one of your ads just like you would normally, but instead of choosing create an ad, you just do use existing post just like we did for the other ones, except here we're inside of our streaming conversion campaign. So, we can go in and select a post. We can choose our Instagram post. And the only caveat here is we you have to go and read that button, right? So, we need to add that call to action of listen now. And then we have to read the website URL. So, I come to one of my other ads and I can go in here and paste that in here. And so now the post on our profile is used inside the campaign. This isn't actually for the right song, so ignore the inaccuracy here, but um we're using an existing post inside of our ad campaign. So any engagement that this this ad gets will show up on our page. There are some pros and cons of this. The pros, of course, we get all that engagement stacking up on our page. The con of this is that, you know, if you're only using existing post in your ads, there's less testing you can do, right? Like this existing campaign had four videos. Typically at launch, you're not going to have four videos live. And sometimes you need way more than four. Like I've had campaigns where I use 25 different videos. You can't post those all at launch. And so if if you're doing an all existing post thing, you're getting all the engagement, which is great, but now you're severely limiting the testing you can do in your campaign. So, you know, use this trick wisely. Uh what I often will do, if I do it at all, is I will wait until some ads present themselves as winners, and then I'll go and post those on Instagram, and then I'll come back and I'll swap them out on the ad. So that way we're waiting, we're doing all our testing up front and then we're going retroactively and swapping in so that for most of the budget the campaign is being spent on existing post. Sometimes you will find that existing posts just do worse than ads though. So be willing to to push and pull and compromise on that if you're finding you're not getting the same results. Anyways, if you want to learn more about how to run the campaigns like I just talked about though, check out this video to see the entire process from start to finish. And if you want to see whatever YouTube thinks you should watch, check out this video. And don't forget to subscribe to watch new videos on my channel every single week. Thanks for watching though. I'll see you next video.