Stop boosting posts! Take control with the Facebook Ads Manager
Do you often boost posts from your Facebook page?
We get it, it’s tough to compete in the digital landscape when your competition always seems to be one step ahead.
What with so many concepts, techniques, and options online to improve digital marketing, it’s understandable that everything can seem a bit too much.
Pressing “boost” might be easy, but you also miss out on many features of the Facebook Ads Manager.
In this post, we want to get down to the hard truth about the Facebook boost button, which can be a “buzzkill” for your digital marketing efforts.
Let us explain how the Facebook Ads Manager is the solution to aimlessly boosting posts.
What is the Facebook boost button?
The Facebook boost button is a “quick solution” to promote your posts. This was a “blessing” to business owners, as it seemed to take out the difficulty in promoting a post with an all-in-one easy click of a button.
However, even though it gives you the option to choose your audience and how much you want to spend, the truth is that it forms part of Facebook’s other advert campaign strategies.
In essence, it’s more “tuned” into optimising the post for engagement such as likes, and follows but not to increase your click-through rate. This is bad because the point of trying to optimise your post would be with the aim of getting people to click-through to your website.
Disadvantages of boosting a post
One of the major disadvantages of boosting a post are for the sheer fact that you cannot control what happens after that post was boosted. In other words, you cannot control any elements that Facebook uses on the post; you cannot control the money that you spend for this option either, once boosted, because it will just be boosted until the budget is reached.
Whereas when you have your ads created in the Facebook Ads Manager, you can switch on and off different ads and adsets based on performance. In other words, you have total control over what is running.
When a post is boosted, there’s basically no turning back… or is there? The good news is, we want to explain what you can do to “reverse” the adverse effects of already having boosted your post. Let’s think of these options as little contingencies since there’s limited control over what happens to a boosted Facebook post.
Limited options when customising the boost post option includes the following:
It only targets likes (People who like your page)
If you don’t have time to generate a following audience that actively likes your posts, then the option isn’t going to work as effectively for you. Besides, even if you did engage many people who will get your boosted post to them, the truth is that it will only amount to more likes.
Having likes and comments is good, but it takes more than that to “boost” your post in a way that the audience will actually, see it everywhere.
Don’t get too caught up in vanity metrics while ignoring the numbers that really count.
You’ll reach people who already like your post and their friends
This option allows the post to be seen by people who usually like your posts as well as their friends, thus an extension to the views. However, again, it doesn’t work for business owners whose posts don’t get the general like from their viewers.
Remember, as a business owner you need to be reaching your ideal customer, not just your family and friends who have been showing their support on your Facebook page.
Allows you to target certain people
Despite being an option to target audiences better, this option is still not effective enough for small businesses.
None of the above options makes the boost option beneficial for your marketing endeavours; instead, every option costs more money. Simply put, you’re going to blindly spend money on an advertising campaign that isn’t working for your business.
Another downside to boosting your posts is that it will choose the audience and that audience is limited to Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger users.
If you don’t have an audience on those platforms, the boost option isn’t going to help you get the reach you need to target your real audience. That being said, spending money to boost your post isn’t lucrative considering these cons.
The alternative option to clicking on that Facebook boost button
The good news is that there are many alternatives that will help improve views and the overall progress of your post as well as how your readers see it.
One of the best things is that you have control over it and that is exactly what you want. Imagine that feeling of being on a rollercoaster, you love the ride but almost regret it because you have absolutely no control until it’s all over.
Maybe that’s a bit dramatic, but hey, it’s pretty much the same when you have no control over your digital marketing efforts. So, it’s time to simplify and embrace the alternatives.
Take advantage of the Facebook Ads Manager
This is the solution to just blindly boosting posts and “hoping” to make sales and conversions.
The Ads Manager is FREE and easy to use once you get the hang of it.
It allows you full creative control when setting up your paid ads.
Some benefits include:
- Start date and end date
- Daily or lifetime budget
- Option to connect and run ads to Instagram simultaneously
- Insane targeting options
- Video, image, carousel or slideshow ad creative options
- Space to write your ad copy, headline, newsfeed link description, custom UTM parameters for tracking purposes, space for your URL (if you are taking them to a landing page for instance)
- Ability to see detailed analytics and performance of your paid ads
- Full control to pause ads that are not performing
Additional features of the Facebook Ads Manager
The Facebook Ads Manager is a great option for optimising your post so that it not only generates residual income but also gets the right people to see and click through it.
Unlike the boost button, Facebook’s Ads Manager allows you full control over your post and you can adjust the settings throughout the creation process. You can use the ad manager feature for older posts too, but the only drawback to the Ads manager is that you cannot go back and change or reset the settings that you choose in the beginning.
This makes sense because once you’ve already set up the ad settings for your post and it’s already engaging the audience, it makes sense that you carry the activity over throughout the “life” of the post.
That said, with the Ads Manager you get better optimisation unlike the boost option and as we’ve just mentioned, you get to optomise existing organic posts.
The Ads manager uses the following options to optmise your content:
- Brand awareness
- Reach
- Traffic
- Engagement
- App installs
- Video views
- Lead generation
- Messages
- Conversions
- Catalogue sales
- Store visits
That’s a lot of options in comparison to the above 3 options mentioned should you choose to boost your post. Even though the boost option targets your audience in Instagram, Facebook and Facebook Messenger, when using Ads Manager, you get more from those platforms. For example, your audience targeted will include:
- Live streams
- Instant articles
- Feeds
- Market place
- Stories
- Instagram feeds and stories
- Audience network (in-stream videos, rewarded videos)
- Messenger (stories, inbox, sponsored messages)
In essence, with the Facebook Ads Manager, you can get more creative and definitely get more return on your investment. Too many times business owners only use the Facebook boost button only to learn the hard truth that it’s not very handy for what their business needs.
Closing thoughts
Facebook provides many ways to earn money and lucrative rewards whilst still promoting your business. A push of a button is convenient and tempting but it’s not really all worth the time lost, and money spent. You can greatly improve not only engagement but most importantly reach your target audience in your market when you take the time to tweak some settings in the Facebook Ads Manager.
It will take time to get used to setting up Ads manager and your ads, but you are not alone and we are here to help you.
