Facebook is a must-have tool in your marketing strategy. It’s a powerful resource to reach your audience on a social media platform they use every day.
With recent algorithm changes and updates, in order to get your message in front of your fans you have to spend money. But what’s the best way to get the most return on your budget? Boosting posts have their place, but Facebook Ads is where you’ll see the biggest ROI.
What’s the difference between Facebook Ads and boosted posts?
You’ve probably seen the “boost” option on your businesses Facebook post, and Facebook may have even prompted you to boost high-performing posts. With a small budget ($5) and just a few minutes, you can boost your regular posts to a wider audience. This audience is still limited—you can only choose between people who already like your page, the friends of those people, or a custom audience based on users location, age, and interests. Even this custom audience, however, pales in comparison to Facebook Ad audiences.
While boosted posts should be a part of your social strategy, it has limits. For one, you should only boost posts that are already performing well, rather than boosting posts you want to do well.
In comparison, Facebook Ads allow you to create a highly customized audience. You can still target by age, location, and interest, but you can go above and beyond to target income, marital status, family size, buying habits, and even life events. With Facebook ads, you test multiple images, videos, and copy (rather than using just one post) to discover which helps you reach your goal the best.
Why you should use Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads has a small learning curve, but with a little experimentation you’ll see how powerful it can be. And for goals other than boosting a posts performance, it’s the smart choice.
Read More: Social Media Marketing Tips—Facebook Ad Basics
To begin with, Facebook Ads are much more customizable than boosted posts. Write your own copy, create a short video or source and image, and figure out your ultimate goal. Is it new Facebook fans? Clicks to a page? Event sign-ups? Most often, our Facebook Ads involve sending users to a landing page to entice them to sign up for something. With this goal, Facebook will charge you per conversion.
Facebook Ads give you the ability to create highly targeted audiences and test them against each other. Have a message that appeals to your college-aged, late night crowd? Choose targeting around them. You can even create Lookalike audiences that resemble your current customers.
Depending on what your goal is, Facebook puts your ads through a learning phase in which it identifies the people most likely to convert and makes hitting your goal more likely. Plus, Facebook gives you in depth analytics on the performance of your ads so you can continue to improve them and make them even better next time.
So next time you’re faced with boosting a post or creating a Facebook Ad, go with the Ad. And if you need some help, send us a message.