Facebook Boost vs Promote

Facebook advertising – to boost or to promote

I know a few businesses have felt the pain of the recent Facebook changes with regular posts only being seen by a small percentage of their likers.

Regular posts to Facebook will generally give you access to about 30% of your audience – if you’re lucky!

The reason this is happened is because facebook WANT TO MAKE MONEY!

We can sit here and bitch and moan about it, complain about how it’s unfair or we can accept that the access to a completely free marketing tool is now over and be happy we had such a good run.

I’ve recently been trialling out Facebook advertising to promote my page, primarily to get more likers (as it’s a brand new page).

In this post I’ll quickly talk about the difference between the advertising options available on Facebook.

Advert Objectives

These are the ads that you’ll be familiar with that sit on the right hand side of the website or on the mobile versions, they’ll pop up as suggested pages.

There are multiple ways you can promote your business that you can choose from :

  • Clicks to website
  • Website conversions
  • Page Post engagement
  • Page Likes
  • App Installs
  • App Engagement
  • Offer Claims
  • Event responses

Depending on your business and your overall goals will determine what type of advertising you will need. For example Website Conversions is a great one for getting people to purchase products for online ecommerce stores.

The great thing about Facebook advertising is you can target your audience by location, gender, age  right down to what they like!

You can get super granular. Why is this so great? Even though you’re narrowing your ‘reach’ ie. less people are seeing the ad – the relevance is higher so your return on investment is far greater.

Boosted Posts

Boosted pages will appear higher in the newsfeed. The goal of a boosted post is not more likes, but more engagement. Engagement is a like, a comment or a share.

This is only of benefit if you have 500+ likers and is only available to pages with 100+ likers (you can promote do the page post engagement instead). It is only going to engage your existing users (and potentially their friends). It’s generally not going to get you new likes. It’s great for brand awareness or promoting specific sales or products.

 

I’ve been happy with the overall results for such little investment in comparison to the amount needed to invest in other paid digital marketing platforms such as Google Adwords.  In addition it has given me access to the exact target audience that I am after, which I think at the end of the day is more bang for my buck. Having said that, that is just for my business, I am not saying it’s the best course of action for every business.

For more information on Facebook Advertising they have some pretty good resources over here. If you need assistance with setting up your Facebook advertising get in touch.