I’ve had a couple people recently talk to me and they are under the impression that boosting a post on your Facebook page and Facebook advertising are the same thing. However, they actually are very, very different. Boosting a post on Facebook is simply promoting a single post to people that already like your page for a short amount of time with a small budget. Facebook Advertising, on the other hand, is full-blown advertising to ALL of Facebook’s users, based on criteria and demographics of your choosing.

How Facebook & Your Business Works

A lot of people know that when you post something on Facebook, whether it’s a picture of your business, a promotion, a link to your blog – whatever it may be, when you post on your Facebook page only the people that like your page see that post. You also need to aware of your facebook cover photo size to make sure it fits the window and appropriately engages your audiences when they visit your Facebook page.

One of the most recent discoveries over the past couple of years with Facebook is that their algorithm has changed greatly. When you go on Facebook and scroll through your News Feed, a lot of the times you see similar people that you interact with all the time. That’s because Facebook changed their algorithm so that you see more stuff that you probably are interested in seeing. Facebook originally was not setup this way – you used to see everything in chronological order, much like a timeline. This could be useful for advertising with some companies using facebook statistics to reach their audience and build their brand awareness.

Facebook wants you on Facebook for longer periods of time, so they want you to see more stuff you actually like. The problem with that is a lot of us have liked a lot of businesses’ Facebook pages over the years and if we haven’t interacted with them, then it is very likely we will never see anything that they posted. Another way of using Facebook to boost your business could be to Buy Facebook Views, since the more views you have the more potential customers who see it.

So what that means for businesses is that probably only two to five percent – maybe ten if you have great engagement from users – will see your Facebook posts. For example, on our Web Centre company page on Facebook probably only a very small percentage of the people that liked my page will actually see any of the posts that I make. So that sucks for a business!

Boosted Posts

If you spent the last few years getting likes on your Facebook page, now it feels like you wasted all of that time and money. So, what Facebook did to combat that and make you feel better about it is they let you boost each post. Meaning you could spend $5, $10, $50, $100 – whatever you want – on a single post and boost it to your followers. That way the people that like your page could still see it.

So it’s a great feature – but not really because Facebook basically said, “Hey, all those people that already like your page, how about you spend $50 or $100 that you didn’t spend before and we will show your content to them.”

If you want to get more than five to ten percent of the people that have liked your page seeing your posts, which of course you do, now you’ve almost got to boost a post to get people to see it.

In short, that’s essentially what boosted posts are. You’re boosting a single post and trying to get people that already like your business page to see it.’

Facebook Advertising

Facebook Advertising, on the other hand, is a full-blown advertising platform for businesses to market their products and services to potential customers. This has become a popular way to market for businesses as the world of digital marketing has increased. Things like email marketing and SEO through an SEO Freelancer are also successful ways that people choose to advertise and market their business in this day and age. However, Facebook is an advertising platform where business can advertise to everybody on the site – not just people that like your page.

Ad Types

With Facebook Advertising, you have multiple options for how your advertisements look and feel. The ads can be image based, video based, they can be a carousel advertisement (which is basically looks like a photo gallery). These can be very in depth ads – and utilize any of these formats.

Calls to Action

Unique to Facebook Advertising is you can setup a call-to-action for customers. A call-to-action is something within your advertising that prompts the customer to do something. Some of the call-to-action examples that we can setup are things like:

• “Learn More”: They click on this and it goes to directly to your website.
• “Get a Quote”: They click on this and it goes to a quote form on your website.
• “Click to Call”: They click on this, on a mobile device, and it calls your business immediately.
• “Get Directions”: They click on this, on a mobile device, and it goes right to directions to your business.

Call-to-action are so incredibly important today online. With a simple boosted post, you can’t possibly capture as many leads or clicks as you could with Facebook Advertising.

Advanced Targeting Options

Facebook Advertising gives you the advanced targeting options, allowing you to really target the customers that you want to reach. Targeting options are very expansive:

• Location: Targeting based on location – which is important if you’re a local business.
• Demographics: Targeting based on age group. For example, if you’re a business that swings to a young demographic or an older demographic, you can target those groups specifically.
• Relationships & Life: You can target people based on their relationship status, their job type, their level of income, their interests. For example, are they interested in business and marketing – Inc.com and Entrepreneur magazine. Are they interested in the healthcare field? Are they interested in SpongeBob Squarepants or The Office on television or American Idol? What are they interested in? You can target people based on that.
• Event Targeting: You can even do Facebook Advertising for your upcoming events. If you really want to make a big splash and get more people to your events, you can create a Facebook event and then run advertising based around it (utilizing specific demographics and age groups).

Cost of Facebook Advertising

Facebook Advertising works much like Google advertising – it’s cost-per-click. So you’re paying every time somebody clicks on your ad. Facebook Advertising will also never be cheaper than it is now. The reason for that is because there’s not a lot of businesses utilizing it yet like businesses are utilizing Google Advertising, for example. That means the cost and the level of competition is low right now. That’s the big key – businesses can take huge advantage of it in this moment.

In Summary

Boosting a Post is promoting a single post that you’ve posted on your page to people who have liked your page. Facebook Advertising, on the other hand, is a full-blown advertising platform. Ads can be several types of format (image, video, carousel, etc) and can be ran to a mass amount of people or to specific criteria (specific cities, multiple cities, demographics, interests, etc.)

Both boosting posts & advertising on Facebook can help your business gain customers and sell your products or services. In fact, it’s beneficial to do both; that way you’re marketing to people already interested in your company (through Boosted Posts) and to new customers (through Facebook Advertising). No matter what you want to do, our business can help your business start advertising on Facebook today. Contact us to get started!