Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying you should not advertise on facebook. Facebook is a great platform for advertising. Traffic comes pretty cheaply and we are able to specifically target people extremely well on this platform. What I am talking about here is the “Boost post” button that is available to page admins and advertisers after they’ve just posted something.
Boosting a Facebook post is a simple way to get more eyes onto your posts. If you’ve been using Facebook for marketing purposes for a while now, you may have seen, or used, the “Boost Post” option. If you’re doing this, here’s why you should stop right now.
Facebook Advertising Account
Facebook Post boost is functionality to make things simpler for page managers…but lacks a lot add ons that you usually get when you go to the advertising account. Here is the panel you see when you go to the ad account.
As you can see, there are a lot of objectives that you can use to better advertise your latest post (or ads).
Your Objective Changes
When creating an advertising campaign on Facebook, you can choose the objective of the campaign. That can be anything from more views and likes, to more engagement, or more click-throughs. Boosting your post, however, has a default objective of more engagement. This may be what you want at the beginning, but the main goal is to get people onto your site and convert. Facebook ends up blocking this from happening.
Lack of Control
When boosting a post, much control you once had over a post disappears. This means you also lose the ability to choose where your adverts appear. You can’t decide if you want them to appear on someone’s desktop, mobile feed, or both. This affects your budget as to where your adverts appear costs money. This also has a direct impact on your results, as you may want to target mobile users but end up having your adverts split between mobile and desktop.
Limited Targeting Options
The great benefit of Facebook advertising is being able to target a very broad or very specific audience. You can decide on the age, interests, location, and a variety of other specifics to ensure your post reaches the correct people. Boosting a post, once again, takes this power away from you. A boosted post takes away the opportunity to pick these specifics and ends up showing the advert to an unspecified group. You end up wasting your money by not showing the advert to people who are interested in your product or business.
Unreliable Statistics
A big problem with boosting posts is dirtying your data pool. You know about traffic that is organic, and traffic gained from paid marketing and boosted posts meld the two together. This is terrible for anyone wanting to keep on top of their traffic numbers and seeing where they’re lacking.
This has a negative effect on businesses who have a tight budget, and want to ensure their money is spent properly. A random spike in their traffic numbers may look great on the surface, but it makes future strategies harder to plan as you won’t know where you need to add more money or effort – be it organic, or paid.
As you can see, boosting a Facebook advert may seem like a quick and easy option for continuing a campaign and improving your engagement and conversion numbers, but it can be a killer – because it costs far more than it is worth.
Related Tags: Digital Marketing | Social Media Marketing
