5 Reasons To Step Away From The Facebook Boost Button
I reckon social media specialists have heard the question "to boost or not to boost my Facebook posts?" about as many times as the opening soliloquy of Hamlet has been recited. With that in mind, it's an absolute pleasure to introduce Caroline Drake from Blossom Social Media and her fantastic blog post about why you should step away from the Facebook boost button.
We all get these prompts from Facebook: Get More Likes, Comments and Shares. This post is performing better than 95% of other posts on your Page. Boost this post for £15 to reach up to 7,700 people.
It’s so easy to do, right? The post you took ages to create, only reached 97 people and it so deserves to be seen by many more people….Thousands of page managers do press the ‘Boost Post’ button every day to increase their post reach. Facebook make it easy to run a campaign. Just set the targeting then the total budget for the promotion. Then it’s running until budget or time runs out. It’s so simple and fast! But what’s wrong with boosting a post?
It can be tempting to boost a post that your followers weren’t particularly interested in. Is it worth paying to show your post to even more people who aren’t particularly interested?!
You can only choose ‘get messages’ or ‘engagement’ as objective. What do you want your post to achieve? Traffic to your website? Leads? Conversions? Head over to Facebook Ads Manager and have Facebook serve your ads to the people most likely (based on previous behaviour) to take your intended action.
Boost offers limited targeting options. Facebook Ads are amazing to help you laser target your ideal audience by gender, age, pages they like: the opportunities are endless. Retargeting with the Facebook Pixel is a brilliant way to talk to an interested audience. You could run the boost then hop across to Ads Manager to tweak the targeting (which, to us, kind of defeats the object of using the quick boost button).
You’re unable to decide where you would like your ad to be shown. We select the best newsfeeds and platforms for an ad (then refine further depending on results), keeping those ad costs down.
No opportunity to test your ad. However long we’ve been advertising on Facebook, experts test copy, images and audiences against each other to make sure we’re meeting our campaign objectives at the lowest cost. Are there times when boosting can be a good choice? Yes, definitely!
You would like to socially proof an ad before serving it to a different audience.
Engagement is your objective and you have a small budget right now.
So, next time you feel your finger hovering over the ’Boost’ button, reach for Ads Manager instead. Spend an extra 15 minutes and save yourself some money!
If you enjoyed this article, take a look at How Knowing Your Audience Can Reduce Your Ad Spend.
Caroline Drake launched Caroline Drake launched Blossom Social Media in 2016, and has been working with small to medium businesses and corporate clients throughout Oxford and surrounding areas as well as nationwide ever since.
Connect with Caroline on LinkedIn
Tweet Caroline at @GrowWithBlossom
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