Facebook Ads vs. Boosted Posts: What’s the Difference?

What is a Boosted Post?

A Facebook Boosted Post is a type of paid ad that runs on Facebook by promoting a post that already exists on your business page. With the help of Facebook Boost, you can BOOST your audience reach outside of people that are already viewing your content. Limited customized settings, audience targeting and ad placement make Facebook Boosted Posts different from Facebook Ads.

Brands can choose certain posts that have high engagement and use it to reach an even wider audience by promoting the post. They can feature a popular service or a product and boost their landing page for more traffic or better monetization.

How To Boost a Facebook Post

To boost your Facebook Post, follow these steps:

1. Visit your Facebook page
2. Choose the post you want to boost and right next to it, click the “Boost Post”
3. Select “Create New Audience” to set up your targeting.
4. Set up a total budget.
5. Choose at which date you would like your campaign to stop
6. Select payment method and currency
7. Click “Boost Now”, and you’re set.

Ads vs. Posts

Choosing whether to use Facebook Ads or Boosted posts entirely depends on your social media marketing campaign.

Each method has a different outcome. When you use Facebook Ads; you get a more aggressive approach and your message is direct and straightforward to your audience, like app installations, subscriptions or product sales. Certain campaigns can benefit largely by the addition of Facebook ads. On the other hand, Boosted posts exist to take your brand’s social media engagement, awareness, and metrics to a much higher level.

For many campaigns, the use of Boosted posts or Ads can come down to whether you would like a short-term or a long-term result. At an advanced level, businesses use a mix of both Facebook ads and Boosted posts in a very clever way to get the most efficient results with the most balanced marketing budget. Boosted posts will get your brand a much bigger fan base, while ads will help your brand yield tangible results. A clever use of both tools will help you build a loyal audience and then turn that audience into loyal customers.

Benefits of Boosted Posts

Along with being your very first step to Facebook advertising, Facebook post Boosting can have various interesting advantages.

More Reach

In contrast to a regular Facebook post, a boosted one has much higher chances of reaching more audience and the one that’s more relevant. Through boosted posts, you can target people based on their interests, gender, age, and location. With the help of such tools, your business comes in the sight of people that are more likely to be interested in it, and those that you have not reached yet.

More Visibility

Organic posts can easily get lost in the user’s feed just because of how much new content is constantly posted on Facebook. With your post boosted, it will appear at a higher position in the user’s feed, which gives your post a much greater chance of being noticed. Posts that appear higher up on the feed are somewhat like website pages appearing higher in the Google results, which means you get more exposure and conversions.

Easier to Manage

Boosted posts are very easy to use, as compared to Facebook Ads. Anything you publish on Facebook, be it videos, status updates, photos, or offers, you can get it boosted within minutes without a hassle. The News Feed specifications are automatically formatted by Facebook, which saves you a whole lot of effort and time.

Benefits of Facebook Ads

Facebook Boosted posts promote your business, and Facebook Ads also promote your business; so what are the things we get from Facebook Ads that Boosted posts lack? Here are a few examples:

Advanced Analytics

You don’t just get an overview of your analytics when using Facebook Ads. Instead, you have all the important data laid out right where you need it. This saves you a lot of time and helps you steer your ad campaign to the right direction.

Facebook “Insights” lets you access all the data, which includes, page likes, weekly reach, best performing posts and post engagements. You can even put a competing brand to see how your business is doing against them.

Refined Targeting

There are numerous tools and methods to target your specified audience, given by Facebook. With these tools, you can really narrow down your target audience by setting your preferred behaviours, location, demographic, lookalike audiences, and more.

With just a few clicks, these user-friendly features take your ad campaign to the next level, be it on Facebook, Messenger, Audience Network or Instagram.

Higher Click-Through Rate

Facebook has an amazingly stable CTR as there are many improvements to the advertising tools that Facebook creates, and businesses keep learning the best way to utilize them. With the right tools and the best practices, you get to reach the right audience every time. This gives you the freedom to be creative and select what to show to your customer.

Facebook has an average click-through rate at 0.95%, across all industries.

Which One Should You Use to Help Drive Business?

Choosing Facebook Ads or to Boost your Facebook post is entirely dependent on your end goal. Is your business simply looking to increase brand awareness and get a bigger audience? If so, simply boosting a post would be a great idea for you.

But if your business is thinking long-term; trying to develop a precise and strategic marketing campaign, with major advertising objectives, then Facebook Ads are what you need. As you make your way through Facebook Ads, you learn a plethora of new tricks that help you squeeze the best out of your Ad campaign.

However, as mentioned earlier in the article; for the most efficient results, you would need to use Facebook Ads and boost your Facebook posts in harmony with each other. Choosing which step to take at what point will decide the most profitable outcome.