Boosting your Facebook posts?  You need to read this.

Boosting posts. Paid adverts. So what is the difference between the two? If you are a Facebook page admin, you would have seen a prompt asking if you would like to Boost a post so that you can reach X amount more people. For lots of business owners this is their first jump into using Facebook paid advertising.

Boosted Posts – What are they?

A Boosted post is a paid promotion of a post that already appears on your page. When you post on your Facebook page, only a percentage of your followers will actually see the content. Boosting a post simply means you can pay to increase your post’s reach/visibility among your own followers and/or a wider audience. Facebook makes this process fairly simple for novice users without having to setup their own Facebook Advert or Pages Manager profiles (which can become more complicated). In it’s simplicity lies its potential danger.

So whats the difference between an ad and a boosted post?

Facebook ads allow you way more creativity in terms of what format an advert can take with a host of different ‘calls to action’. A boosted post can only be used to promote a page post that is already in existence. This means they’re really only useful for increasing engagement (likes, shares, comments).

If your objective is to get your post in front of a bigger audience, then boosting a post may be the way to go. It is not the best way to go, however, to promote content on your website, where your goal is to entice people to click through and make a purchase or if you want to drive an action from your audience, such as ordering a pizza, or to book a table at your restaurant or even to collect info for future email marketing campaigns. Think about it as follows: boost if you want to increase engagement, however if you want your audience to take action, you might want to utilise a Facebook ad instead.

When to boost and not use ads?

Boosting is very easy, and because Facebook prompts you to do it without really thinking about it, many business owners do it without consideration of important metrics like the performance of the post against their expectations. Boosting a post is not always a good way to achieve your Facebook marketing ad goals.

Ok, so when is a boost better than a Facebook ad?

Facebook launched the ability for advertisers to create custom audiences based on page engagements, which means you can target ads to anyone who has engaged with content on your page (including your posts). If you see a post is getting quite a bit of engagement, it might make sense to pay for a boost to get even more engagement.

As a guide, boost when:

1. A post is getting plenty of engagement (likes, comments, shares) already.
2. You are not directly selling anything, but rather providing more info about your brand.

When to use ads and not boost?

Right, so we have touched on how boosted posts are limited in the following two important ways;

With boosted posts you can’t target based on behaviour and your only available goal is to drive engagement with the content. You are therefore limited on whom you can advertise to and what they can do with your boosted post.

It is also worth mentioning an obvious feature that Facebook ads, unlike boosted posts, do not have to appear on your page. You could create “offline” ads that your page fans never see and promote it to a specific audience.

If you want to create an ad that sells your products or want to drive action from the audience, you are better off using Facebook ads. If you have lots of time on your hands, you can create these yourself, however a successful ad campaign entails setting up objectives, creating enticing creative copy, editing of artwork/photos, monitoring ad performance & analysing results to allow for mid campaign tweaks and so on.

Setting up an ad with the required thought and objectives can therefore suck up the valuable time of a business owner, even if they have the creative flare of an advertising agency. Enlisting the services of an online marketing agent such as PortKey Solutions or any reputable agency can be more time saving, cost effective (and profitable) than you may think.

Use boosted posts as part of your overall strategy

To recap, while boosting posts have an important role to play, it is best that you use this feature when you:

1. Want to save time by boosting right from your page.
2. Only want to increase post engagement
3. Are not trying to drive an action, sell a product or increase visits/conversions on your website

Boosting posts are a great way to get to know the most basic form of Facebook advertising, however there are many options available to advertisers that are more effective at achieving particular goals.