Facebook Ads: The pros of promotion vs. boosting

Facebook’s “Boost” button may seem like the quickest, easiest way to promote posts from the front end, but the reality is that setting up a campaign in Ads Manager is just as easy — and it’ll yield both better results and cleaner data than boosting.

That’s because “Boosting” a post simply doesn’t spend your brand’s money as efficiently as setting up a new campaign would. Boosting has limitations in format, objectives, and audience. It also creates results that aren’t associated with the organic post you Boosted. If the thought of using Ads Manager to promote your organic posts intimidates you, not to worry — we’re here to help. Let’s walk through the simple process of setting up a Facebook Ads campaign properly and efficiently.

Facebook offers a wide variety of objectives. Are you hoping to generate awareness, drive clicks, promote video views, or do something else? Perhaps you’re looking to accomplish multiple goals. Simply select the objective(s) that meet(s) your goals. Pro tip: Be sure that your objectives also match the creative material you plan to promote. For example, rather than using video content to run a brand awareness campaign, it might be better to use the video views objective in order to achieve results congruent with the content.

Now, it’s time to name the campaign. Doing so will allow you to easily reference the campaigns both while they’re running and after they’ve ended. It will also make reporting much easier when the time comes.

When you’re creating a campaign, ad set, or ad name, it helps to create a naming convention that provides consistency and clarity for every campaign you launch. This will help you track and measure performance with easy-to-understand nomenclature that ties back to your campaign and message. Here’s what you’ll see when you name your campaign:

The ad set level is where you schedule the dates of how long you’d like the ads to run, build a relevant target audience, and choose where your audience sees the ad when they are using the app.

The ad set is arguably the most important part of promoting your existing organic content. If you do this properly, you can use the audiences and targeting you build here again and again.

Create a Schedule for the Campaign

When creating a schedule for your ads or promoted content, it’s important to factor in how much budget will be applied for each day. While this isn’t always a set or exact amount, Facebook will optimize accordingly in order to ensure an equal amount is spent day by day. For example, if you plan on promoting an organic post for a week you’ll need to allocate enough budget for each day so that the post will perform at it’s best. With that in mind, there is a balance between scheduling and budget

Build your audience

Creating a relevant audience is the key to any successful paid campaign; this will effectively keep costs per result as low as possible. Start by creating an audience based on previous page engagers — people who have already engaged with your Facebook page. Then layer your audience by inserting relevant keywords, interests, demographics, geographic location, behaviors, and more in the Detailed Targeting section.

Choose your placement type

Once you’ve got your audience dialed in, the next choice you’ll make is the placement type for your campaign. A placement is the section or area of Facebook where an ad is served (news feed, story feed, marketplace, etc.). A critical piece when creating an ad set is selecting proper placements for your campaign. In order to get the most bang for your buck, simplify and eliminate placements that aren’t necessary for your objective. Start by removing Messenger and Audience Network; focus instead on Facebook and Instagram Feeds. From here, you can add placements you think will be beneficial and remove placements that make less sense for your campaign.

Optimize, optimize, optimize!

Before moving on to the creative portion of your campaign, the last thing to check is your optimization. For example, when running a traffic campaign you’ll have a few options for different optimizations, depending on what the goals of the campaign are. If driving traffic is your goal, optimizing for Landing Page Views will most likely be your best bet at driving users who will convert and stay on your landing page longer. Link Clicks will be your best bet if you are more concerned about driving volume of users to the landing page.

Finally, the moment has to come to promote your existing organic content or post. Once you’ve selected the proper Facebook and Instagram pages, go to the ad setup, scroll to “Use Existing Post,” and find your organic creative. If your goal is to drive traffic to an off page landing site, you can add a CTA button as long as you have the corresponding URL. That’s it! You’re ready to promote.

Setting up campaigns allows you to promote posts on the fly whenever organic content is resonating with your audiences. It helps you amplify what’s working so that you can expand your reach and maximize your impact on social media. In platforms like Khoros, you can publish organic posts and promote them in a single workstream, increasing your efficiency and helping accelerate the speed of generating insights about your organic and paid content.

So, does Facebook Boost work? Yes, but not nearly as well as promoting content by creating a new campaign.

Want to learn more about the Khoros platform, or need additional strategic counsel on how to optimize your paid and organic social campaigns? We’re here to help — request a demo today.