Don't Waste Your Money on Boosting Instagram Posts
Once upon a time, I used to be a micro-social media influencer. I was rather okay at it too. It was quite easy for me to build an audience, maintain a community, and grow my brand despite my eclectic interests and general disinterest in fully selling out to hit the big numbers required that could make my hobby into a sustainable career. I never once had to pay to promote any of my content and I still partly attribute my active social media channels to the success of my debut novel selling over 200 copies in its first year. YouTube even paid me $100 at one point for my content.
Then, I quit. Not that anything bad or major happened; I just got tired of living my life around an algorithm. My incredibly micro-social media career made me feel like I was performing my life more than living it for social media, and I wasn't even significantly famous or recognized in any major capacity! But I recently got back on the social media grind because I published a book I really liked and wanted to promote it. I also thought it would be interesting to dip my toes into how modern day social media marketing is going these days after, like, a five year hiatus even though I used to play with it daily from like 2013 to 2020.
Folks, it's really bad.
Back in the day, I used to be able to amass like 2-5 new followers a post just by posting every day on Instagram and playing fun hashtag games with books that I legitimately enjoyed. It probably helped that I was cute, dumb, and young because cute, dumb, young white girls get away with a lot on social media. I was also relatively nice to other people on social media. But now, despite still being cute and dumb (but not so young) and still relatively nice to other people on social media (despite being a bit cranky about social media itself), NO ONE is seeing any of my posts. I can't even get my existing followers to see my posts, let alone introduce my content to new folks!
Desperate, I actually did some research into how to expose my content to people on Instagram. It turns out, Instagram now offers a “Boost Post” ad model where creators can pay Instagram real life human money to expose posts to new people of a specific demographic. In Instagram’s own terms, “You can boost a post on Instagram to turn it into an ad to help your brand reach new audiences and drive engagement. Boosted posts appear in Explore, Home Feed, Explore feed, profile feed and Stories.” (Boost a post on Instagram)
From first impression, this seems like a very obvious exploitative cash grab. Like, oh? You want new people to see your posts? Forget the fact we used to allow new people to see your posts for free in the past just from well-used hashtags and right posting times. Why don’t you pay us, an already billion dollar company, to allow new people to see your posts instead? If you don’t pay us, then I guess no one sees your posts. Your choice, but clearly there’s only one option if you want new people to be exposed to your content (it’s give the billionaires more money for basic use of their platform).
However, as mentioned earlier, I'm dumb. So I was willing to play into their blatant cash grab from exploiting desperate business owners for the bit and see what happened. After all, again, I had that book I liked that I wanted to promote to new readers and this whole social media marketing adventure is supposed to be one big experiment anyways. I had very little to lose (except for a chunk of change from my business checking account).
To cover my bases here, if you're a legitimate business person with a legitimate company that you want to make legitimate profit from, don't do any of this. I'm just an indie writer hitting social media with a hammer to see what it can do and, graciously, has a little bit of money to spare for these kinds of things. I will still freely confess that I have yet to pull any sort of profit from any of my writing and don’t expect to for a while. So take from this impromptu, amateur social media study as you will.
From my research, the most successful boosted Instagram posts include a couple of factors:
The post already needs to be doing well organically in order to translate for a new/paid audience
The boosted post should be budgeted for a minimum of $5 a day for at least three days
Last five posts on the page should be quality
With this in mind, over the past three months, I boosted three posts:
The announcement that my most recent book was now available in store through Boulder Bookstore
A generic book with flowers post that featured all five of the books I published through my publishing company so far as of September 2026
Two posts featuring my debut novel “How to Survive a Ghost Story” just in time for the spooky season, including reviews for the novel within the carousal slideshow (which it was recommended by one site that testimonials did well in boosted posts)
All three were doing quite well organically, my page was in a good place with the five most recent posts, and I budgeted them accordingly for the $5 minimum for at least three days.
The final result? I’m never going to waste my money again on boosting Instagram posts.
None of the posts really did anything stellar with the money I gave them and it felt like I was just dumping chump change into billionaire’s wallets while draining my business checking account in the process.
Here’s the breakdown of each boosted posts’ performance. Feel free to check them out on my Instagram directly as well: https://www.instagram.com/dalygoodmedia/
Post: Boulder Bookstore Announcement
Reason to boost: It was already popular and I wanted to test the boost function while promoting the news that my book was available in the bookstore
Call to Action: Mix of actions
Audience: Targeted audience based on Colorado location (because the bookstore is located in Boulder, Colorado) and interest in pirates (because the book is about pirates)
Duration: 6 days
Money: $30
Results:
Views: 3,261
Engagement: 195
Profile visits: 61
Follows: 15
External link taps: 2
Messaging conversations started: 0
Personal Thoughts:
For my first boosted Instagram post and just to see what it would do, I’d consider it a success. My goal for July was to reach 100 followers before the end of the month and boosting this post got me to 110 by August 2nd. I think the targeted audience aspect was the biggest factor for the success since the nature of the post was to promote my book being placed in a local Colorado bookstore so directly targeting a demographic exclusive to people that could visit the store or be interested in visiting the store while still interested in the topic of the book (pirates) helped the engagement on the post. But, none of those new followers actually translated into sales, to my knowledge, and I haven’t seen much engagement from the new followers on follow-up posts. But hey! At least I finally crossed the 100 follower threshold I was hoping for.
Post: Book Lovers Sunflowers
Reason to boost: It had all of the books published through my company so far featured and was doing well organically
Call to Action: Visit my profile
Audience: Facebook decided aka “People most likely to engage”
Duration: 6 days
Money: $15
Results:
Views: 1101
Engagement: N/A
Profile visits: 27
Follows: 17
External link taps: 1
Messaging conversations started: 0
Personal Thoughts:
I’m actually surprised this gained me more followers than my first post that had more engagement. But I still wasn’t super impressed with the performance here. It just didn’t feel like a quality investment. I think the more followers comes from the fact I had more content to show for my post than my first post and the call for engagement came from the “visit my profile” call to action. I’m not sure if it was the smaller money invested or the more generalized AI generated audience to cause the less than impressive showing. Maybe both. The content itself seems fine, but it still seems malarky that I have to pay to have my content even show on pages for numbers I did for free back in 2018 on lower engagement posts. I’ll probably continue directly targeting based on manually created audiences for future boosted posts.
Post(s): How to Survive a Ghost Story promotions
Reason to boost: It’s the spooky season, and the book is spooky, and the posts were doing well on their own
Call to Action: Visit Profile
Audience: Targeted Ghost Story audience (based in Midwest and ghost-interests)
Duration: Originally for 4 days, only survived to 2 days
Money: Originally for $40, stopped around $20
Results:
Views: 3287
Engagement: N/A
Profile visits: 98
Follows: 3
External link taps: N/A
Messaging conversations started: 0
Personal Thoughts:
I almost forgot I boosted these posts, that’s how low they were performing. I knew what success looked like with the other two posts so I knew these numbers were significantly lower than anticipated, despite it being my largest budget so far, especially since I was hoping for more follows from the profile visits. Rather than let Instagram continue to steal my money for less than stellar results, I stopped the campaign around the halfway mark and saved myself $20. Maybe it would’ve been more successful with a bigger budget, but quite frankly I’m not spending that kind of money when boosting posts has already been so fruitless for me.
From my experiments, it seems like the only success from boosted Instagram posts comes from manually targeted audiences where I created the audience myself, not the AI generated one, and from just throwing more money at it for long periods of time. Even then though, the audience it generated for my Instagram page didn’t actually translate into book sales or any sort of meaningful interaction aside from boosting my follower numbers.
As I’ve been discussing with other indie authors figuring out online book marketing, it seems like the only benefit to utilizing Instagram for authors is mostly for brand awareness and proof of life. Very few of us seem to have much success with actually converting sales from the site and it looks like my failed boosted Instagram posts might be evidence of this. I was able to get a chunk of new followers from the posts, but since they’re not necessarily people who are organically interested in my content or work, my posts on a post-to-post basis still have pretty low engagement. It seems like a lot of the followers from the boosted Instagram posts are just following out of kindness, or maybe the hope that I follow them back to boost their own numbers, and never really converting to anything substantial for my page.
From my experience and research, it looks like building an authentic community through organic posts and legitimate audience interaction is the only way to be successful on social media. People know when you’re selling them something. People also know when authors say “I just want to build community!” while harking your book and not actually engaging your audience just means you’re just following a script to get those followers.
Building a community on social media requires actually befriending and legitimizing your relationship with your audience through authentic discussions and interactions. When I was playing the YouTube game, I legit kept track of my usual followers who regularly liked and commented on my stuff. I’m pen pals with several people I met through the platforms and helped a couple of others launch their own channels or otherwise did what I could to support their endeavors. My first fan art for one of my books even came from commissioning a regular follower that I followed back and enjoyed their art as they posted it to their feeds.
It also means only posting what is authentic to your interests and stuff that you actually want to be posting so you can actually have meaningful interactions with your audience. If you only post to chase an algorithm, you’re going to have a bad time and look like a sell-out. Even worse, you may be blinded by the chase and post something incredibly insensitive trying to appeal to the algorithm, like tying the promotion of your books to a horrific publicly identified sexual assault case. (Daily Mail) If you pay to get followers, they’re very rarely going to actually want to interact with your content full time for free so your engagement is still going to remain low and ineffective. I personally would prefer an audience that actually engages with my content than a high follower number that does nothing with the stuff I create. Part of the fun of creating is seeing how others interact with it, after all.
So I personally will probably never boost another Instagram post again. It was a fun experiment, but it’s not worth the money that can be invested elsewhere for promoting my writing endeavors. Instagram, in general, doesn’t seem to be worth the time it requires to build a substantial audience. Not that there’s anything wrong with an Instagram audience; Instagram just really requires SO MUCH time to bring any return on investment on it. It’s pretty much a twelve hour shift keeping an eye on Instagram and building community on the platform by itself, which isn’t helpful for folks who want to do other things with their life, like live it. Or actually write something. Or focus their marketing elsewhere.
If I did something wrong with my boosted Instagram posts and you want to correct me, feel free to do so in the comments but keep in mind this is the casual experience of someone with a tiny bit of social media marketing experience. Something like Boosted Instagram posts or getting your followers to actually see your posts on Instagram probably shouldn’t be this hard to figure out. You can also follow me directly on Instagram to judge my posts in real time if that’s your bag of tea: https://www.instagram.com/dalygoodmedia/