Why You Should Stop Boosting Posts on Facebook
The most common Facebook Ad topic that comes up with real estate agents is about boosting posts.
The advice from the experts: NEVER Boost a Post.
You’ve heard this before. How often do you actually get the answer why?
Boosting a post is like donating your money to Facebook. It’s running ads with training wheels on. It will help get you where you’re going without falling down but no one is seriously using it.
When you go to create an ad in the ads manager, the first screen that comes up shows all your different ad objectives.
This screen is the main reason why. When you go hit boost, you’re generally optimizing for engagement.
Facebook is trying to make boosting better. So there is actually an option now to optimize for the traffic objective.
At the end of the day, it’s still better to go through the ads manager and take those training wheels off. Think about how you use Facebook, 20% of people on Facebook actually engage with posts on a regular basis. That means they’re liking, they’re commenting, they’re sharing. There’s a much larger group of people who observe without engaging .
I know that a lot of people see everything I’ve ever posted, will talk to me about it like they’re my best friend. I’ve never seen them like or comment on a single thing I’ve ever posted, though.
Some people don’t like to put themselves out there, but read everything. They’ll watch every video, they’ll click on every link.
If you boost a post, it’s only optimizing for engagement. That means it’s optimizing for that 20% that engages. You often want to target the 80%, because they’re as likely to do business with you.
If you want to optimize for those people who were going to click through and go read an article, you choose traffic. If you want people who are likely to actually watch the video, you choose the video views objective.
Facebook knows who is likely to actually watch a video because they know how you use Facebook. They know some people will comment without watching but others watch a video without commenting.
If your goal is to get people to watch the video, you want to optimize to those people who are likely to watch it.
This is why you don’t boost a post. You can optimize based on what your goal is, and Facebook knows based on user data what they’re likely to do.
They know some people are likely to look at the article you posted without reading it and then comment. They know others will click through and read it. Depending on what your goal is, you want to be able to choose the right one that matches your goal with the ad. You don’t have that flexibility boosting a post on Facebook.
There are other reasons not to boost a post. You can more advanced audience and targeting options. You have more control over leveraging Facebooks ability to learn and improve your campaigns, and so much more. These are more advanced things that when you get to this level you REALLY don’t want to boost.
There’s a lot of reasons not to boost, but at the beginner and intermediate level, the main reason is because of picking the right objectives.
Facebook is constantly improving the boost option. One day it may be worth it and similar to the Ads Manager. There used to be the Ads Manager and the Power Editor, they became closer over a time. Then Facebook merged them into one. Its possible this happens one day with boosting but that day is not today.
Stop Boosting. Start using the Facebook Ads Manager.
