Finally, The Truth About Facebook Ads and Boosting Posts

I get to speak with a lot of entrepreneurs from different industries with businesses of different shapes and sizes. And I want to share with you 2 exchanges which are quite common which I still experience every other week.

Exchange 1:

Me: I help entrepreneurs grow their business with Facebook Ads.

Him: Oh! You mean like boosting posts?

Exchange 2:

Me: I help entrepreneurs grow their business with Facebook Ads.

Her: Oh! Yeah, that doesn’t work. We tried boosting our posts before and all we got were likes on our posts but no inquiries or sales.

This happens to often and if you’re reading this, you may have thought like the person speaking with me. So here I am with this piece to finally clarify whether or not boosting a Facebook post is the same as Facebook advertising and when to use what.

Here’s the truth.

Boosting a Facebook post is one of the ways we are able to advertise on Facebook. So yes, boosting posts are Facebook ads but when we talk about Facebook ads, they don’t necessarily mean “boosting”. So the bigger question now is, what should you use?

To better answer that, let me break down their difference further.

“Boosting” is a function that Facebook Pages have wherein there is a “Boost” button on the page’s post. When you click that button, a small window pops up where you can set your target audience, set your budget and set how you will pay for those ads. On the other hand, in general, when we talk about Facebook ads, we set it up from Facebook ads manager.

(FYI, if you have never explored this yet, please go to www.facebook.com/adsmanager to access your ads manager for the first time. You’re free to explore the platform and how it works. You’ll only start having charges when you publish an ad.)

Setting up an ad from ads manager requires more information. Apart from the target audience, you’ll also be asked for the campaign objective. This is a very crucial part of the Facebook ads creation process because the campaign objectives determine how Facebook will deliver your ads. By telling Facebook what your objective is, it will do it’s best to deliver that result by showing your ads to people in your target market who are likely to take that action.

It’s pretty straightforward.

If you want people to click on your link and land on your site, select the Link Clicks objective then Facebook will deliver your ads to people who are likely to click on the links. If you want people to watch your video, select Video Views objective and Facebook will deliver your ads to people who tend to watch videos on Facebook.

If you want people to message your page to inquire, select Messages objective and Facebook will deliver your ads to people who tend to be active on Facebook Messenger.

Finally if you want people to fill out a form on your site or take an action on your site like to add-to-cart or to buy, since these actions are referred to as ‘conversions’, then select Conversions as the campaign objective.

The amazing thing about this is when you tell Facebook the result you want, it will do it’s best to provide that result. Then, as you get results, Facebook profiles the people who take these actions and is now able to look for more people who are similar to those who have already taken action.

Now, when you boost a post, it skips this whole process of selecting a campaign objective and automatically optimizes your ad campaign for Engagement or Video Views (If it’s a video). That’s why when people simply boost a post, they will only get likes but no action. Because the ads were delivered to people who will engage, not inquire or buy. We had multiple opportunities to test this.

We had one ad going to one audience set but we ran them in different campaign objectives. The campaign with the Link Click objective definitely got more clicks, the Video View campaign got the most videos and the Engagement campaign brought in the most engagement. It was the conversion campaign which ad the least amount of clicks, view and engagement, but it had the most number of results among all the campaigns.

This is why I always recommend running Facebook ads from ads manager, so you are able to tell Facebook specifically what result you are looking for.

Are you starting to get the difference?

Now the last question is: If this is the case, should we boost our posts?

With your new found understanding of boosting posts, you might be thinking “NO!” And you’re not alone. A lot of advertisers are really against boosting posts, calling it a waste of money. But my personal answer is that yes, there is still value in boosting posts.

Why?

Because as we mentioned, boosting posts is still a function of Facebook advertising. It’s when Facebook optimizes our ad delivery to people who are likely to engage with a post. Engaging may be in the form of reacting, commenting or sharing.

What if for one or two specific campaigns, like for an awareness campaign, you’re not looking to sell but you’re really just looking to reach and engage with your target audience. Facebook advertising doesn’t always have to mean that we’re selling something. It can be that we’re just paying the platform to help us reach more people and engage with them.

So when you do your Facebook ad campaign, it’s very clear that you know what your actual objective is. Is it to generate leads? Sales? Inquiries? Engagement? Video Views? Once you’re clear on that, then select the campaign objective that correspond to those results and start seeing the campaign results you’ve been wanting.