As Facebook continues to incorporate a “Pay to Play” model for Facebook Business Pages to receive reach and engagement, many businesses are weighing the options between a Facebook Boosted Post Vs Ad for reaching their target audience.
Organic reach is no longer viable on the platform as a post may receive as little as 10 percent of views from a Page’s followers, but most business owners are confused when it comes to the differences between setting up a Facebook Campaign and simply boosting their posts, which we’ll be exploring in this post.
What Are Boosted Posts on Facebook?
Boosting a post on Facebook is essentially a watered-down version of setting up a Facebook Campaign. The boost post option allows you to choose a post that’s already on your business page and promote it.
Using this feature allows you to choose your target audience, a total budget and the duration to run your post. In a recent update you can also encourage readers to visit your website if the post includes a link.
The biggest difference between a boosted post and a Facebook Campaign is in the limited functionality that a boosted post offers in customization. It focuses primarily on visibility and engagement, which can be great for brand awareness, but it doesn’t allow you to choose through other conversion options like store visits, actual conversions, lead generation, or where the post is displayed.
Here are a few key takeaways before we dive further in the differences between boosted posts and Ad Campaigns:
- Figure out what your goal is from Facebook advertising before you start allocating a budget into advertising—the type of advertising that you use will be different depending on what your goal is.
- Boosting posts are a simple and great way to gain more exposure or further engagement from your audience
- Facebook Ads are the best way to go if you’re trying to perform more customization or advanced targeting
Facebook Ads Vs Boosted Post – Which Is Better?
The interface for boosting a post is much simpler and doesn’t offer the variety of customization options that are available when you run a Facebook Campaign.
Like I mentioned, you have the option to choose a marketing objective such as traffic, conversions, product catalog sales, lead generation or app installs, allowing for a better fit depending on what your social media marketing goals are.
Facebook Campaigns also let you choose from different placement options, whether you want your ad to display in the sidebar, the Facebook news feed, Instagram feeds and stories, instant articles or messenger ads, whereas a Boosted Post only lets you check or uncheck whether you want it to display on Instagram.
You can display your campaign to desktop or mobile users only, which can be significant depending on who your target demographic is.
By using a full ads system, you have control over who your custom audience is alongside detailed targeting based on target interests and behaviors, which isn’t available on boosted posts.
Manual bidding is also available for impressions or link clicks alongside more creative control in making carousel ads, adding headlines and descriptions, choosing the right CTA button based on your preferences, which you can’t do through boosted posts.
When to Use Facebook Ads Vs Boosted Post
While you should be using Facebook Campaigns most of the time, simply boosting a post has its own benefits depending on what you’re trying to promote.
As an example of using a Facebook Campaign, a dealer can create a video awareness campaign promoting in-store specials for the month. That dealer can then retarget the audience who watched the video and incorporate a lead ad that automatically fills out most of their information.
After that audience converts, the dealership could then retarget the users who visited their website and show those users high-converting carousel ads based on the vehicles they researched on the website.
This is one option that social media marketers have in their arsenal when using Facebook Ads that can produce incredible results with a relatively low CPC or CPA.
On the other hand, you can boost a post when the target goal is to boost brand awareness or increase engagement. Boosting a post has its own value depending on the overall goal for the boost.
Facebook Ads Vs Boosted Post Recap
To wrap things up, here are the main differences with Boosted Posts and running an Ad Campaign:
- Figure out what your goal is from Facebook advertising before you start allocating a budget into advertising—the type of advertising that you use will be different depending on what your goal is.
- Boosted posts take significantly less effort to set up compared to Ad Campaigns.
- Boosted posts are best for brand exposure or FB Page engagement, whereas Ad Campaigns are best for retargeting and conversions.
- Ad Campaigns offer a wider variety of customization options such as CTA buttons, manual bidding, ad placement, ad types and detailed targeting.
Both have their inherent uses, but I find Facebook Campaigns to be the more robust option that will allow the most bang for your buck in driving sales conversions, whether through e-commerce or in the physical storefront.
The ultimate goal for any business is to drive more sales as effectively as possible while beating the competition. Digital offers such a wide variety of targeting options at relatively low CPC or CPA to a massive audience.
Boosting posts is great for social media, where the focus is to spread brand awareness, increase new followers and customer loyalty, but that’s only a small part of the overall scope for most digital marketing initiatives.
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