Why in 2020 You Should NEVER Press the “BOOST POST” Button On Your Facebook Page
Do you have a Facebook page?
Do you have a Facebook page? Have you tried to click on the Facebook “Boost Post” button to promote your post content? If you did, I have some terrible news for you. “Boost Post” is a “Certified Way To Waste Your Money”. If you’re using it very often, you might be losing hundreds or even thousands of bucks away to the drain. Without any returns.
Why?
In this article, I’ll show you exactly what exactly “Boost Post” does and why you should never, ever use it to promote your content on Facebook.
What Is a Boost Post?
In 2007, Facebook’s ad platform was first introduced. It still in its early stages and looked very complicated to many business owners.
So in the 2012, Facebook introduced a super-easy way to sponsor your content: “Promote Post.” With it, you could create a Facebook ad campaign without leaving your Facebook page:
After awhile “Promote Post” became “Boost Post” and received more updates. But its usage remained the same. To offer a quick and easy way to spend money (or waste money) and reach more people with your Facebook posts.
As the organic reach has collapsed over the past few years, many Facebook business page owners are turning to “Boost Post” to get more reach.
What Happens When You Click On Boost a Post
With Boosted Posts, your targeting choice is limited and all settings are rolled up into one boost. As of May 2019, the Boost Post feature restricted targeting to a small list of options. Some of the major limitations:
- Limited to interests targeting, and not advanced demographic and behavioral options
- Broad fans plus “friends of fans” targeting
- No placement or device targeting (Desktop vs. Mobile vs. Column)
- Limited duration of ad time; there’s no ongoing option
- Can’t use a custom audience or conversion tracking features
The biggest kind of difference between the Boost Post button and manually promoting a post through Ads Manager is the number of targeting and bidding options you can choose from. This really could change the game of your business. Without any way to do specific targeting, you might as well go back to tv advertising.
Why You Should Not Boost Your Posts
Facebook automatically optimizes your campaigns depending on which objective you choose from the setup.
If you wanna try to go with Website Traffic objective, Facebook will optimize for traffic to your website. If it is Website Conversions, Facebook will analyze everyone who converted already and will try to reach similar people first which is more expensive.
But if you boost a post, Facebook will always, AWAYS optimize just for more post engagement (or for more likes, shares, comments, and so on). Which benefits nothing to conversions and sales which matters the most to most businesses.
Because you might want to optimize for more video views and purchases/leads when you are doing ads with videos.
Very often, you’ll see ads receiving a ton of post engagements(engagements including clicking your video/pictures/likes/etc), but just a fraction of those people will click through to your website and finally even purchase.
Therefore benefits nothing to businesses.
With Boosted Posts, your ad reaches only one audience at a time.
Limited Targeting Options
If you look at Facebook boost post targeting, you have five options:
- Location & Age
- People you choose through targeting | advertising to a specific target audience you choose.
- People who like your Page | advertising to all your fans,
- People who like your Page and their friends | advertising to all your fans and all their friends,
- Member list
And finally, you can’t control the placements of the ads you pay for.
No Control Over Ad Placements
When you’re boosting posts, you cannot choose where you want your ads to show. The default option is always Desktop News Feed & Mobile News Feed.
You need to know that Facebook does a ton of optimization automatically for you, which means most of the time their algorithms will find the cheapest way to get to an objective, even if it might damage your overall campaign outcomes.
So if you choose to set both Mobile News Feed and Desktop News Feed on your Adset, Facebook might correct as much as 99% of your advertising budget switching to mobile (because of much less expensive than Desktop News Feed), despite whether it’s getting you leads or sales:
If the website is not mobile-friendly or speed optimized, it can be even worse.
What Can You Do About It?
Well, stop using Boost Post! That’s a good start.
No matter what result you are looking for, you can do it much more effectively by creating ads in the Facebook Ads Manager.
Even if it takes you 30 minutes longer, you’ll be able to choose the most suitable campaign objective, select relevant target audiences, and have total control over where you want to show your ads. Do not feel cumbersome! We are talking about loss and profit here!
In the end, your goal should not be just to get more engagement but to get conversions (such as visiting your website, sign up, register, or buy a product) and you should do everything you can to achieve those results most cost-effectively.
