For starters, before a brand begins to advertise on Facebook it must decide on its unique advertising goals – some can be reached by boosting a post and others can be reached by creating a Facebook ad campaign. But, what’s the difference?
A boosted post is a post already in existence on your page’s timeline, that you can apply money to in order to boost it to an audience of your choosing. This is by far the simplest way to advertise on Facebook and is fairly straightforward to do. Boosted ads are different to Facebook ads as they aren’t created in Ads Manager and don’t have all the same bells and whistles. The ‘Fisher Price’ of social media advertising, if you will.
When you boost a post, it’ll appear in your audience’s News Feed (either on Instagram or Facebook, or both) as an ad. We’ve all seen the ‘sponsored post’ labels and are familiar with this as an advertising method. You can choose a post that’s already working for you on your page’s timeline and add budget behind it to give it an extra (and Facebook didn’t win any awards for wordsmithery here) ‘boost’. This takes just a few steps and can be done via desktop or mobile.
When boosting a post, you can dictate the following things:
- Who you want to reach (a target audience of who you want the ad to connect with)
- Your maximum daily budget
- For how long you wish to run your ad
Once you’ve boosted your ad and it’s approved by Facebook, those people in your target audience will see it appear in their newsfeeds for the duration that you’ve set.
It’s quick, it’s simple and it’s using content that already exists, which can be very attractive if your team’s time is limited and you want to increase your page likes, comments, shares and achieve a little bit of brand awareness to boot.
Facebook Ads
Facebook ads is more like the Millennium Falcon Lego set of social media advertising. Boosting does work, but only gets a brand so far. Ad campaigns is where things get exciting and can reach across a variety of Facebook and Instagram’s audience platforms.
Facebooks ads are created through Ads Manager and offer more advanced customisation options. There are many more advertising objectives available to reach your specific business goals and the audiences you care about the most. Facebook ads can be optimised for App installs, website conversions, video views, shop orders and more.
As well as appearing in a newsfeed on Instagram or Facebook, with Facebook ads you get the added benefit of choosing placements in Facebook News Feed side ads, on Facebook Marketplace, directly into a person’s Messenger, Instagram or Facebook Stories, Instant Articles and Facebook’s Audience Network – placing the ads into Apps or games, basically, you can put them into articles, search results, even in-stream videos. There really is no escape, but it’s also targeted so is based on the recipient’s interests (Facebook will even show it to those more likely to engage with it).
Objectives in a nutshell
Choosing a specific ad objective early on will help you to focus on which campaign type aligns with your current business goals. Here are the main hitters:
- Brand Awareness shows ads to people who are more likely to remember them, not just to the masses (Facebook will target those who best engage with posts such as these, resulting in a better response)
- Reach shows ads to the maximum number of people – a bit like boosting, except you can choose alternative messaging, imagery, video etc.
- Traffic sends people to a destination (website, App, Facebook event or Messenger conversation)
- Engagement can be tailored to get more page likes, post engagement (shares, likes comments) and event responses
- Video views shows people video ads specifically
- Lead generation is for those brands wishing to collect leads via a form/sign up method etc.
- Messages encourages people to send messages via Messenger or Instagram DM
- Conversions shows ads to people who are most likely to take valuable actions, such as making a purchase or adding payment info on a website etc.
- Catalogue sales can be used to show people ads with items from the profile’s catalogues
- Store traffic shows ads to those who are likely to visit a physical retail store, when they’re near them (geo-targetted)
And even better, with Facebook ads you can design an ad specifically to suit your goals… Create carousels, promote a video, add specific descriptions and add a call-to-action button that’ll drive more of your audience to take action (and more).
Our verdict?
Whilst boosting posts allows you to target people based on interests, age and gender, Facebook ads gives you more advanced tools to create overlapping audience types and lookalike audiences and enables your brand to really tailor its ad campaigns and end goals for a more sophisticated approach to its social media marketing strategy.
Top tip: if you do want to boost a post from scratch you can create a new post and instead of clicking publish, select to boost it instead.
