Is Boosting posts a waste of money?

Like any good questions, the answer is it depends. Learn more below... 

Facebook makes it easy to Boost your posts and it can be a fairly simple way to promote your business online. However, more often than not, it's simplicity comes at the cost of effectiveness and can result in business owners getting questionable results from their ad spend.

Read on the learn where many businesses go wrong when hitting the Boost button: 

Default targeting

Unless you specify otherwise, Facebook will generally show your ads to everyone 18+ across NZ as the default audience. 

The size of this audience (active Facebook users) is around 3,800,000 - 4,400,000 people, although reaching more people is usually great for business, for many small local businesses, the majority of these millions of people won't have any need for what you're selling and unless you're selling nationwide, will be outside of your service area.

As someone living in Palmerston North, do I have any need for a landscaper based in Auckland? No!

Yet these are the kinds of ads popping up on my feed on a daily basis. Business owners are essentially wasting their money paying to reach this incredibly broad default audience.

​It's worth taking the time to establish your target audience and consider things like location, demographic and interested based targeting. With Facebook's Saved Audience feature you can input location, age, gender and interests to get an estimate of your target audience size and use this to inform your advertising.

See some examples of Facebook Audiences in my previous blog here.

​Giving a bad first impression

Social media posts are often written in the context of speaking to your current page followers, however boosting your post generally helps it reach those not already following your page; these are two difference audiences and should be addressed accordingly.

Often, people seeing your Boosted post will be unfamiliar with your business, what is sells and where it is located so will need more information on what you do more than an existing page follower would. 

Before you boost a post you want to ensure the post gives a good first impression of your business and provides the most basic information.

​No call-to-action

Effective ads make it obvious what action people should take. 

If you're paying to promote a post, are you wanting people to scroll right past it or take the time to learn more and visit your page? 

Even if you've added a 'Send message' button to your post, give people a reason to message you, for example, it may be to arrange a free quote or consultation etc. If you want people to follow your page, give them an idea of what content they can expect you to share and why they should want to see it.

Paying for engagement

Paying for post likes or page likes offers very little return if the people liking your page are not your ideal customers or in your target audience. Remember that Facebook wants to keep people on their platform as long as possible, if you goal is to get people from your Facebook page to your website you want to ensure your ads are optimised to so, something Facebook rarely promotes and doesn't always make easy with the Boost button.

​If you've selected engagement as a goal, Facebook will end up showing your post to people most likely to like it or leave a comment, rather than people most likely to have an active interest in what your business is about. Often this can attract more spam than potential customers.

Ignoring data 

The benefit of social media, particularly Facebook, is that there is a wealth of data to be collected. If you're boosting posts and not reviewing your ad results then you're missing out on applying any insights to future advertising efforts.

At the very least, you should know where your ads have shown, what action people have taken, how many times it appeared and the CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) so you have benchmarks to use going forward.

Rather than simply saying that your ads 'aren't working', these data points give you indicators for improvement and help identify what went wrong.

Want to learn more about running Facebook Ads

I'd love to discuss your Facebook ad goals and what ads you're currently running. Reach out for a free discussion and advice on how you can optimise your ad spend. If you have ads actively running when you contact me I'd be happy to offer a quick review and free pointers.