When you start to get some traction on your posts or ads, you might start considering putting some spend behind them to get them in front of a cold audience (aka people who have never heard of you).

But which do you choose? Engagement ads, or boosting posts? 

Boosting posts is the easiest option of the two and most basic way to advertise on Facebook. You can boost a post straight from you page, choosing either boosting it for engagement (likes, shares, comments. Essentially social actions people will take on your post), or video views (pretty self explanatory!) if your post is of a video. Unless you’ve limited your posts to a specific audience, you can choose who to target at this stage. Within a couple of clicks you’ve got a post being fed to whoever you’re targeting. Easy! 

Boosting posts can be pretty cheap, with a minimum of just a dollar a day. And they’re an easy way to get your posts in front of even just your page fans. Thanks to Facebook’s algorithm, your page posts will only be seen organically (aka without spend) by about a handful of your page fans. Facebook want their users to have “meaning interactions”. They also want to make money and keep their shareholders happy, so their algorithm makes it so that only a handful of people will see your post unless you put some money behind it.

However...

Boosted posts are not the right ad move for small businesses.

Why not get as much as you can from Facebook out of your budget? Sure they make a bazillion bucks a second with their eyes closed, but keep reading. 

Boosted posts are simply not strategic enough. As a small business, every single dollar counts and you shouldn’t be creating an ad using the “boost post” function simply because it’s more convenient. While there’s a few extra steps, Facebook Ads Manager will help you get your posts in front of your designated audience, and at the same time give you a heap more options for your engagement ad. With boosted posts you can only target by age, sex and location, so just the basics. On Facebook Ads Manager, you can target by language, certain behaviours (what type of pages your audience likes, if they commute, job titles, that sort of thing), as well as scheduling exactly when you want your ad to get fed to people. If you know your target audience are night owls, why wouldn’t you take advantage of targeting your ad only at night? You can also choose how often you ad can be shown to one person. You have a lot more control as to who you ads gets fed to on Ads Manager compared to boosted posts.

While boosting posts is easy to do and convenient, how are you going to continue targeting any of that now warmed up traffic if you haven’t kept track of them? With boosted posts, once your spend is used up, that’s it. You can’t create any new audiences off those users that have engaged with your ad, no retargeting, nothing. You can see the results of your boost in the insights tab on your page, but the data is very top level. You can’t deep dive into it to see how users really reacted to it.

But that’s where engagement ads come in. With engagement ads, that data is conveniently saved. So you can create a great little campaign targeting these new potential customers by creating what’s called a custom audience, which is an audience you can build based off of an action they’ve taken on either your website or on one of your ads, such as the post you want to get more engagement from. If you’ve got an ad running with a video, you can even target customers who have watched a portion of the video, such as half or the full thing. 

The other advantage with Facebook Ads is you can feed these engagement ads onto different networks. Not only can you have you ad on Facebook, you can feed it to Instagram or Facebook’s Audience Network, which is where your ad shows up embedded in news articles or blogs. Handy tip though, if you’re wanting to put your ad into Instagram or Facebook stories, make sure your image or video is vertical, not horizontal. More on that in a future post.

As a small business, every penny counts. Facebook makes a bucketload of money every second, so why not get as much as you can from their platform? With Facebook Ads manager, you can create that engagement ad you need, and so many more. It might take a bit of extra time, and you might need to be at a desktop, but the amount of insights you’ll get and options you have to really hone in on your audience really outweigh the convenience of simply boosting a post. 

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