Gone are the days of reaching everyone in your social network on Facebook and Instagram. It’s not uncommon for businesses to reach only 2-4% of their fans on Facebook with each organic post. Businesses looking to extend their reach on the world’s most popular social networks have two choices to get their message in front of potential customers: boost posts or run Facebook Ads campaigns. While boosting posts might be a great solution for social media influencers and bloggers looking to build up engagement rates or get more blog post views, most businesses are looking for a greater return on investment from these networks. If you’re a business looking to use social media to generate sales, you should be running Facebook Ads, here’s why.

What are “Boosted Posts”?

Companies that create a business page on Facebook or a business account on Instagram, have the option to promote an existing or new post as a boosted post. These posts then show up in the Facebook or Instagram newsfeed as a sponsored post.

Boost posts give you the ability to select targeting parameters (demographic, location, and interest targeting), a budget, a CTA, an objective, and the length of time you want the post to run for.

What’s the difference between boost posts and Facebook ads?

Facebook ads offer a much more robust set of features and better performance than boost posts. These are some of the critical differences between the two.

• Ads manager allows you to select different ad formats. Using Facebook and Instagram ads you can choose to show a single image, carousel, video, or slideshow ad.
• Your ad placements go beyond the newsfeed. Advertisers have the ability to show ads in Stories, Facebook Marketplace, in the right-hand column, in Instant Articles, within videos, and in Messenger. Boost posts only show up in the newsfeed.
• Boost posts only offer three objectives: post engagement, messages, or website visits. Facebook ads offer a multitude of objectives. Some of the more popular ones are website traffic, leads, conversions, and video views. When you select one of these objectives Facebook will deliver your ad the users who are more likely to take your desired action.
• Advertisers can use a pixel installed on your company website that communicates with ads manager to create retargeting campaigns. These campaigns allow you to send an ad to warmer leads who’ve already visited your website.
• In Facebook ads, you can create look-a-like audiences. Facebook can take an audience or list of customers and find people on Facebook similar to this group to send your ad to.
• Ads manager gives companies in-depth reporting.
• Ads give you the option to run A/B tests.

Why ads are worth the investment.

Boost posts are designed to help Facebook and Instagram users expand their reach on the platform. They aren’t designed to be used as a robust and highly targeted advertising solution for businesses looking to generate leads and conversions.

The multitude of targeting, testing, optimization, and format options that are available with Facebook and Instagram ads lead to better ad performance and better tracking than boost posts. The money you invest in these two types of campaigns is the same. The real difference is that one boosts your vanity metrics and the other makes it easier to generate meaningful business results.

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After months of scrutiny about privacy concerns and where ads are actually coming from, Facebook has taken action into their own hands. Advertisers and consumers alike went to sleep on Thursday, June 28h and woke up on Friday, June 29th with a pretty substantial change on their favorite social media platform.

With Facebook trying to crack down on fraudulent accounts that have previously served false ads, they have opened a floodgate of possibilities for its consumer base.

Here is a screenshot of how you can discover what advertisements a page is currently running:

Whenever a change is enacted on a platform that has 2.2 billion monthly active users, there is going to be a learning curve in how the new updates are utilized. This most recent update is going to bring both positive and negative aspects to the platform, however, the transparency between the platform and the consumer is at an all-time high.

Here are some of the positives and negatives that can be found with the new update:

Positives

• Facebook users will have full transparency on the platform as is pertains to who is paying for the ad that they are seeing
• A user can view any/all active advertisements that a company is running at that moment in time – providing consumers with more information than ever about the platform
• A consumer can see the history of a specific page – showing any changes that may have happened throughout the years

Negatives

• Competitors can now see and copy a businesses’ exact ad strategy
• You cannot hide your special offers from your competitors
• Someone outside of your target audience could hypothetically see the advertisement that you were offering to select individuals

Overall, this is a step in the right direction, and the positives far outweigh the negatives.

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