If you use Facebook for your business, chances are you’ve boosted a Facebook Post hoping more people would suddenly flock to your business.
I hate to break it to you, but if you are costing yourself money. If you are using it regularly it could be hundreds or thousands of dollars wasted.
The Boost Post feature offers a quick and easy way to spend your marketing money and reach more people with your Facebook posts.
Over the years, organic reach has gone down on Facebook and many page owners are now turning to “Boost Post” to get their messages in front of their audiences because it’s fast and easy. Though it’s fast and easy, it’s not the best idea. (Scroll to bottom for TLDR)
So What Happens When You Boost a Post?
You go to your Facebook page, find a post you want to promote (advertise) and click “Boost Post.”
You then choose your audience, your budget, and the campaign duration, and click “Boost.”
What you may not realize is Facebook just created a new ad campaign in your personal ad account with the default choices for you – it’s the lazy man’s way of advertising. And that’s where things start going in the wrong direction.
“Though it’s fast and easy, it’s not the best idea.”
Why You Should Not Boost Your Posts
Facebook optimizes your campaigns depending on which objective you choose.
If you choose the Traffic objective, Facebook optimizes for traffic to your website. If it’s Conversions, then Facebook will analyze everyone who converted already and will try to reach similar people first.
But if you boost a post, Facebook will not give you all of the objectives. By default it will optimize just for more post engagement, meaning they will optimize for more likes, shares, comments and so on. Sometimes, if that really is your main objective, that’s ok. But there are other problems.
Have you ever noticed an ad that gets a ton of post likes (because they’ve targeted so broad)? Keep in mind, chances are only a small fraction of those people will click through to your website, your event page, or your landing page. It’s never about likes. It’s always about conversion and sales. You want results, period.
Limited Targeting Options
If you look at Facebook boost post targeting, you have three options:
1 People who like your Page – advertising to all your fans,
2 People who like your Page and their friends – advertising to all your fans and all their friends,
3 People you choose through targeting – advertising to a specific target audience you choose.
Let’s go through these options:
People who like your Page:
If you didn’t do great with attracting high-quality page likes (very few restaurants do), you’ll be immediately wasting some of your money.
People who like your Page and their friends:
No matter if you have super relevant likes (fans) or not, you’ll still be wasting your money – the Friends of Fans audience can have up to a million or even more people in it – many or most won’t be within the appropriate radius of your restaurant because their “friends” can be all over the world.
So there’s really no way Facebook will be able to find the most relevant people.
People you choose with targeting:
Although this sounds good because you can choose specific interests, the targeting choices they give you are still very limited.
No matter which targeting option you choose, you will be wasting your money. Whether it’s 10% or 30% of your budget, it can add up to thousands of advertising dollars thrown away.
And finally, perhaps most importantly, you can’t control the “placements” of the ads you pay for.
No Control Over Ad Placements
When you’re boosting posts, you can’t choose where you want to show your ads.
You already know that Facebook does a ton of optimization automatically for you. Most of the time their algorithms will try to find the cheapest way to achieve an objective, even if it might ruin your overall campaign results. They would love to show you a lot of likes and engagement, but that doesn’t always translate to results.
For example, let’s say you want to promote an upcoming wine tasting event at your restaurant and you are wanting to sell tickets for it. If you choose to advertise on both Mobile News Feed and Desktop News Feed, Facebook might, unfortunately, push as much as 99% of your advertising budget to the one feed or the other if it’s cheaper for them, despite it not getting the best results for you.
So, if you choose both placements (something you can’t control with the “Boost Post” option), you’ll probably be getting a ton of traffic that doesn’t convert at all or converts poorly. And if you are trying to drive people from Facebook to your event page, your wine tasting registration landing page, your website, your menu online, or anywhere else outside of Facebook, then you need conversions more than “likes.”
What Can You Do About It?
You can stop using “Boost Post” on the front of your Facebook post. Unless your money does actually grow on trees.
Whether you’re a restaurant or not, the audience you want to reach can be reached more effectively by creating ads in the Ads Manager.
Yes, it may take you a few minutes longer, but you’ll be able to choose the campaign objective that makes the most sense for your restaurant, you’ll be able to select more relevant audiences, and have complete control on where to show your ads.
Combined, these things will result in you saving advertising dollars and a better return on your restaurant advertising campaigns.
In the end, your goal should not be just to get more engagement, but to get people to take an action – visit your website, sign up for an event, opt-in with their email for a contest, buy a gift card, or simply come into your restaurant – and you should do everything you can to achieve those results in the most effective way.
Implement the advice in this post properly and you’ll get more traffic, more leads, more customers, and more revenue. If this all seems a little overwhelming, let us know. We’re here to help. We’ll work with you to assess your current situation and give you a roadmap in a complimentary 30 minute strategy session. You’ll leave knowing what you need to do to take your business to new heights. http://bit.ly/39DafCC