Facebook Ads v Boosted Posts?

What are Facebook ‘Boosted Posts’?

A ‘boosted post’ is simply a timeline post on your brand’s Facebook Page that you can put money behind to reach more users than you would organically. When you consider that the average organic Facebook Page reach is sitting around 5.2% as of late-2020, boosting your post ensures that the social content you’ve put hard work into is more likely to be seen by users across Facebook.

How do you boost a post on Facebook?

To boost a post on Facebook, simply visit your Facebook Page and click the blue “Boost Post” button below the post. Then there are a couple of brief campaign settings to choose from:

1. Goal

This lets you decide what kind of results you want to achieve from the post. Choose from either ‘Engagement’ (to prioritise showing ads to people who are more likely to react, comment or share your post) or ‘Website Visitors’ (to prioritise showing ads to people who are more likely to click the link in the post) or ‘Automatic’ (to let Facebook decide for you).

2. Audience

From here, you select who you want to see the post based on certain qualities, such as age, gender, location, interests or behaviours. You can also target people who already like your page and their friends. More recently, Facebook has now introduced the ability to target custom audiences with boosted posts as well – so you could remarket to website visitors, lookalikes or target a specific customer list.

3. Duration

Then you set how long you’d like the boost to run, either in days or set an end date. This can be helpful for a time-sensitive call-to-action – just remember that the longer the duration, the harder your budget has to work to deliver results. Facebook recommends a minimum of four days.

4. Budget

You can then set a lifetime budget, with a minimum spend of $1.34 per day. This is good for cost control and budget plans so that you can set a max spend per post. Facebook will also provide you with an estimated reach based on the budget and duration you’ve set.

5. Placements

Lastly, you can pick where you’d like your boosted post to show, either on Facebook, Instagram or in Messenger – or all of the above.

Once your settings are complete (and your credit card is connected to your account), you are ready to boost your post! In the past, the boosted post functionality was fairly limited in terms of campaign settings, with less specific targeting capabilities and no ability to select specific channels, so over the past few years the offering has definitely been expanded. The idea of boosted posts is to provide an easy, user-friendly way to post ads. If brands do not have the time or resources to tackle Ads Manager, boosted posts can be a great solution. However, this also comes at the cost of the more powerful features available with Facebook Ads and Ads Manager.