Setting up Automated Post Boosting is similar to setting up any other kind of Automated Ads campaign. The key areas you need to pay attention to are:
- Creating the post feed
- Creating the Automated Ads campaign and setting up filtering that picks up the posts you want to boost
- Selecting a campaign structure that matches your goal and use case
Post feed creation
In order to do post boosting with Automated Ads, you will need to create a post feed for one or several Facebook pages and Instagram accounts. You can create a post feed in the following places:
- Account Settings > Feeds for Automated Ads > Add Post Feed
- Directly in Automated Ads campaign creation in the Feed section
To create a post feed:
- Click Add Post Feed
- Enter a name for the post feed
- Select the Facebook pages and Instagram accounts to include in the feed
- Click Create Feed
Up to 100 most recent posts from the selected pages and accounts will be fetched in the feed. You may need to refresh the feed listing to see the new post feed.
ℹ️ Note: In order to create an Instagram post feed, the Instagram account needs to be connected to a Facebook Page. This is a Facebook limitation. See Add Instagram accounts for instructions on how to do that.
Automated Ads campaign creation
During campaign creation:
- In the Feed section, select a post feed for your campaign
- Configure feed filtering, campaign settings, and audience setup
- Filtering for posts is done exactly like filtering feed items in any other Automated Ads campaign. You can filter items both on the feed and the creative level. For more information on specific filtering options, see Filtering boostable posts.
- The campaign structure you select will determine how posts and ads are placed into ad sets. In most cases, we recommend using the Fixed Ad Sets structure. For more information on which structure to choose, see Automated Post Boosting campaign structures.
- In the Ad Template section, set the creative type to Automated Asset Customization Ad, then enable Select Page from Feed and select the feed field containing your page ID. You can also do the same for the Instagram account. Please note that you cannot use Page from Feed for both Facebook Page and IG Account at the same time.
If you want to automate both set up 2 different ad templates and filter the templates for the different platforms. - Select Post by ID and select the feed field containing post IDs.
For Instagram boosted posts, only a Page sourced Instagram account will be available. You will need to set up a different creative template to use this page: 
In the image above you can see that the Instagram account was connected through the Facebook page. In the Instagram creative template, we wanted to pull that Instagram account into the campaign by setting Instagram from feed option.
Make sure to separate the Facebook creative template and Instagram creative template in to its own ad set with correct placement targeting.
Excluding ads from automation
If you publish a lot of posts, you might want to exclude well-performing posts from automation so that they will not be archived when they no longer match your filters or are no longer contained in the feed (we only take the latest 100 posts from your page, and posts older than that will get archived unless they are excluded from automation).
To exclude an ad from automation:
- Go to the Automated Ads campaign and select the Ads tab
- Select the ad
- Click More > Exclude Ad from automation
Limitations
- Currently we only support the latest 100 posts per page.
- Currently it is not possible to boost tagged products from Instagram via Facebook API, i.e Smartly platform.
- The post you want to boost must match the general ad requirements of the campaign objective you have chosen. For example, if your campaign is optimizing for conversions, the posts you boost must contain a link to an external website.
- Due to a bug on FB side, we are trying to boost posts independent from the set promotion status.
- This means that the campaign might try to boost a post which might not be eligible for promotion, FB will reject the ad, but the campaign will run further without interruption. You can learn more about unsupported posts here
- Once the bug is solved on Facebook ends, we will filtered out these posts automatically again.
- Instagram Stories are not available for boosting at this time: API access is limited to Instagram feed, reels and carousel posts only.
- Instagram Carousel posts can only be boosted via API together with a CTA attached therefore not possible on V1 Smartly while possible on Workspaces beta*
- (Currently unsupported by the API) Using post insights is not supported yet for filtering Instagram posts (number of likes, shares, comments, etc.). You’ll have to filter the posts based e.g. on message or description text. We’ll add this as an option once it’s added to the API capabilities.