The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly Sides of Boosted Posts

If you run a Facebook Business Page, you’ve probably felt tempted to click that “Boost Post” button right beside one of your posts at least once. Sometimes, you’re confident enough in your latest post that you’d want to expand your reach outside your current user base. What could this mean for your business? More users liking your posts, following your page, visits your website, product sales, new referrals, and so on.

Facebook sells it as a way to “reach thousands of people for only this minimal amount of dollars.” It makes Facebook posting look effortless, cheap, and cost-effective. I get why you’d use it and I don’t disagree—sometimes, a quality message just needs to reach more people. But if you’re paying for increased exposure, you would hope to have some control in choosing who to get in front of, right? I’m not here to say your content should go to waste or stay limited to a small organic audience; the question here is whether there are better moves than à la carte boosted posts.

The Good: Boosting is Easy

You don’t have to deal with intricate and detailed targeting, worry about campaigns goals and ad types, or unpack complicated reporting with boosting. All you need is a budget (tiny, most of the time) and the location you want to focus on. You can use a dash of demographic info if you want (like age or sex), but the spirit of boosting a post is Facebook running your post through a megaphone. With this, Facebook gives you a broader reach and not worry about the minutia. The best news about this is, if reaching whoever you’re targeting, you’re definitely going to achieve it.

The Bad: There’s No Strategy

With Boosted Posts, you’re basically paying Facebook to show your post to as many people as your budget can within a limited area. While Boosted Posts are a top choice when it comes to convenience, they lack something crucial: strategy.

With such a limited set of features, Boosted Posts do not allow you to create a marketing plan to meet your specific business’ objectives. You know your products and services have different buyer profiles at different stages of the funnel, so why shouldn’t your marketing efforts?

The easy-to-setup configuration of Facebook’s Boosted Posts loses its charm when you realize you need more than to just spam your post to as many people as you can. Facebook Ads, on the other hand, are extremely customizable in both their composition and delivery, with a vast selection of call-to-action buttons, ad types and even audience sources.

The Ugly: Where’s Your Bottom Line?

So you boosted a couple of posts, spent a few hundred bucks and at the end of the day, you’re not sure how impacted your sales. You might have received a couple more likes and even new followers, but when it comes down to tangible results, there’s no real way to know how many of those likes became a lead or benefited you in a concrete way. Your numbers will be as simple as they can, and will only give you little data or insight to work on.

Think of a boosted post like a billboard: it’s sitting there for everyone to see and drive (or scroll) past. Does it help your business? Maybe. But does it get the best bang for your buck? That’s still unclear.

Facebook, like all ad platforms, has ad space to sell; designated spaces which will contain ads, and a great many users who they’d like to show them. A grim truth behind targeting is that when you aren’t specific with whom you’d like to reach, the ad platforms will gladly take your money and fill their gaps. If you don’t control which users and placements can see and show your message, they’ll assume you don’t care and give the high priority users and placements for the advertising parties who do.

Have you ever sat in a restaurant next to the fire exit, under a way-too-cold air vent, with poor lighting, and asked to move to another table? Had you not asked, they would have left you there because someone else asked for the nicer table. Ad space is basically the same.

The Good Again: Incorporate Page Content with Facebook Ads!

If you’re confident you have killer posts on your page, we applaud that and we want to help ensure they’ll be used in the best way possible.

With Facebook Ads, we can incorporate your own page content into marketing campaigns that will not only have the right settings to reach your goals, but also provide valuable data and insights. Want us to create some ads while using your posts created in-house in a tandem effort? Our professional team of strategists can evaluate and compare results, supply you with a comprehensive report explaining your campaigns’ performance, and use that in your favor to come up with new ideas for future ads.

You don’t have to give up on your in-house designs or your top-notch creative. Talk to Strathcom and we’ll combine powers to up your game and take your business to the next level.