Tom Welbourne
Helping Small and Medium Businesses Achieve Their Full Marketing Potential | Digital Marketing Expert
Should You Boost Facebook Posts? Are They Worth It?
- December 7, 2018
- , 1:10 pm
The chances are you are already experimenting with Facebook Ads and have started to work out how to configure, as well as test your campaigns. If you haven’t started with Facebook ads, then you’re probably wondering what a “boost post” is and the various other terms on the platform.
Like many people, (including some of our clients) when they first started out, they chose the boost post expecting thousands of leads and traffic to start heading towards their website. As you’ve probably discovered if you have used a boost post – they can be a waste of time and money!
The reason people chose the boost post option is that Facebook makes it so accessible and easy to use, that it’s usually the first form of advertisement people come across on Facebook. Facebook is fully aware of this which is why they created the option to boost a post from the page interface
In this post, we will talk about what boost posts are and if they are actually worth it…
What happens when you choose to ‘Boost a Post’
So, when you choose to boost a post, Facebook will always optimise your post for engagement (links, shares and comments).
This is important to know because Facebook provides a number of objectives that you can choose from when creating your campaign aside from engagement.
What does this mean for your post? Well, you may be seeing a lot of people liking and commenting on your post, but if you look a little deeper, you will see that the majority of those people, if any, are not actually clicking through to your website. This means very little traffic is heading towards to your website which in turn means you’re not getting those all important conversions.
Limited Targeting Options
Facebook gives us three options when choosing who to target in our boost post:
People who like your page
People who like your page and their friends
People you choose through targeting
Unless your target audience is already liking your page and you have the people you want to sell or interact with liking already, then the first option is money thrown down the drain. This applies even more so for option two because it is even more unlikely Facebook is going to be accurate in connecting you with friends of fans.
Despite the third option being more targeted than the first two (which isn’t hard), option three still doesn’t provide options such as controlling where your placements go, detailed targeting, including or excluding certain people or custom audiences.
So, regardless of what option you choose out of the three, it is almost guaranteed that you are going to lose money!
Other Marketing Objectives Available To You
If you were to use the Facebook Ads Manager, you would be presented with a host of different Ad Objectives, in fact, you would have over 17 different combinations of marketing objectives to choose from.
Below is an image of the variety of objectives Facebook provides us:
If you’re using the boost post format from your page’s interface instead of the Ads Manager or Power Editor, the 17 other marketing options will not be available for you to use.
A perfect example of missing out on a highly valuable feature is the Lead Generation objective that you can choose in the ad manager. The Lead Generation objective is great because it allows you to create a form which you can ask people to fill out with custom questions to gain a better understanding of your customer. This increases your conversion rate as it allows your audience to easily submit forms compared to visiting a webpage.
Should you use Facebook Boost Posts?
To cut to the point, no. Why? – because with the Facebook Ad Platforms offering better options, it doesn’t make sense to not make full use of it.
Gone are the days of hoping for the best in targeting your audience, you can pretty much pinpoint your ideal customer to the exact specification. You get to choose who sees your ads and who doesn’t. Facebook boost posts takes away those options that the Facebook ad platform provides.
Our advice, save your money and if you’re not sure how to use the Ads Manager, then hire an agency that specialises in creating Facebook ads to get you better results and more bang for your buck!
We have a team of Facebook experts here at The Good Marketer who can help you with your marketing objectives and most importantly, get you the most value for your money at an incredibly reasonable price too.
Learn more about how we can help you grow your business and set up effective Facebook marketing campaigns for your business today.
