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Facebook has come a long way since its debut in 2004. There’s no secret as to why it holds first place on the social media stage as the platform continues to improve features and enhances simplicity. Not to mention the large audience the platform holds (over 2.7 billion users) that you can serve ads to.
From connecting with friends and family worldwide to selling that old treadmill on the Marketplace, Facebook has something for everyone. It’s even optimized for ads to promote your business to a wider net, helping small business and large corporations continue to increase revenue through digital means.
Speaking of advertising, how do you market your business on Facebook? Do you prefer boosting posts or using in-depth advertising through Facebook Business Manager? While both can be beneficial to your strategy, knowing the similarities and differences between the two can help you know where to place your efforts.
In the most simple terms, boosted posts are giving an extra “boost” to a post you have already shared organically. This strategy puts ad dollars behind a post that already exists on your page. With the additional dollars, the platform will expand the reach of this post to get more eyes on it, hopefully helping your post get more likes, shares, comments or views.
Think of it like this, Facebook helps your post be seen by more people with this additional spend than it would be seen organically. Ideally, boosted posts can be effective when looking to increase engagement or boost awareness for your brand and events.
A particularly favored feature of boosted posts is the ability to project the number of people reached based on your budget. The higher the budget, the higher the number of “Estimated People Reached.”
This helps spread your content to a wider net, bettering the chances your post will perform well. Boosted posts are not only relevant to Facebook, other platforms like Instagram are taking advantage of this less complex advertising strategy.
This type of advertising may sound appealing but like most things in life, it doesn’t come free. Boosted posts are a quick, easy way to .png?width=263&name=Untitled%20design(16).png)
spend money to reach more people with a single post.
One of the best benefits of boosted posts is the cost. Unlike its counterpart, you don’t need an extremely large budget to boost a post. You can boost a post for just 10 dollars if you’d like. This helps smaller businesses with lower budgets push their page out to more people.
If you prefer to have more control over your ads to meet your marketing objectives, a Facebook Ad campaign may be the better option. This method offers advanced ad opportunities and customization to reach the exact audience you’re looking for.
Facebook Ads are created in the Ads Manager section of Facebook Business Manager. These ads can be used to promote a product or service, drive traffic to a link, create brand awareness, generate leads, and increase revenue. Ads Manager provides more in-depth customization settings to reach people who are in a specific location, enjoy relevant topics, and even people who have visited your website or engaged with previous ads. You can truly pinpoint a user through this advanced targeting.
Facebook ads are also only delivered to your targeted audience. Unlike boosted posts, these ads exist only for the eyes you’d like to see them. No matter the scope, the reach is wide with Facebook ads.
While boosted posts will promote your one-off post easily, the post will only show up in the news feed—the same place users would’ve seen it organically. The content will be shown on either the Facebook or Instagram newsfeed and be listed as a "Sponsored Post". Beyond that, there is no other place to display your content.
With Facebook Ads, advertisers have more options on where the ads are seen. Placement.png?width=279&name=Untitled%20design(17).png)
options include stories on multiple platforms, explore pages, and audience networks. You can customize the creative to fit in different aspect ratios depending on where it's being shown. You can opt in to all placements or just a few-truly letting the advertiser drive the strategy.
Boosted posts are limited in audience targeting. The target settings for boosted posts only allow for a few options to be listed, such as location, age, and gender. It’s a much simpler targeting strategy than one you could create with ads.
Facebook ads allows for broader, more detailed targeting. Unlike boosted posts, the targeting for ads can be much more fine-tuned in regards to the hobbies, interests, and behaviors of your target audience. You can create a targeted audience of website visitors within the last 90 days. You can export customer lists from your site and use those to retarget or reengage customers.
By creating a custom audience, you can also generate “lookalike” audiences. Lookalike audiences are Facebook users who have the same qualities as your most engaged followers, but aren't yet engaged with your brand. This pulls specifically from actions on your page to find people who would be most suited to your content.
This doesn't even touch the surface of the goals you can reach with ads. With three major objectives available to choose at the campaign level (awareness, consideration, conversion), you can cultivate a strong ads strategy based on the exact goal your business has in mind. Within these objectives are more pinpointed goals, such as reach, app installs, video views, store traffic and more.
Boosting improves a post’s overall reach, but Facebook Ads can get much more direct with who, where and how your ads are seen. You can create very specific creative to get an exact message across to a niche audience.
You cannot change the description, media, or links to an original post before boosting it. You may only add a CTA to the post. Otherwise, the boosted post will look identical to the original post shared.
In Ads Manager you can create entire campaigns with video, images, and even carousels. You can think of carousel ads like a merry-go-round of content such as videos, images, text, links, and CTAs that your audience can swipe through all in one post. That’s basically ten posts for the price of one.
Further still, you can edit and adjust ads even after they've been set to deliver. Is a campaign not performing well? You can jump right into Facebook Business Manager and change the image, copy, or link. While it's not recommended to edit your ad too frequently, this is a game-changer for ads that need a small adjustment or have exhausted the same creative.
It's no surprise that Facebook Ads drive leads and Facebook boosts drive engagement. The goal of putting dollars behind content is to ensure better performance. However, not every business has thousands of dollars of ad spend to play around with. By understanding these two methods of advertising, you can easily see what will move the needle for your business,
Your unique business goals will determine which strategy aligns best with what you're trying to achieve. Most often, businesses can use both targeted ad campaigns and boosted posts to improve their business' online presence.
If your team is looking for additional information on building Facebook ads or other social media advertising, contact us to see how we can help.
