Social media advertising can be a fantastic way of improving the reach and visibility of your social media content. 

Facebook has made this easier than ever by allowing marketers to use Boosted Posts.  

While Boosted Posts might seem like a hassle-free way of advertising, there’s a big difference between the capabilities of Boosted Posts and running ads through Business Manager. 

The latter is how the majority of brands run their social media advertising and it’s important to understand the difference between the two. It could be the difference between your social media advertising being a success or a failure. 

Boosted Posts – what are they? 

Using Boosted Posts within your Facebook and Instagram advertising lets you amplify the content you are posting to your organic feeds so that it reaches a wider audience. 

It is a very quick and simple process to boost your existing content and uses some of the targeting options that are offered through Business Manager. 

You can choose how long your Boosted Post is visible for, what audience interests you want to target and what you want your audience to do when they see your ad. 

Boosted Posts are available on both Facebook and Instagram and to do this, you just need to push the Promote or Boost button and follow the guided steps.

What are Business Manager ads?

Business Manager ads offer a more advanced way of reaching and leveraging your target audience. 

They use a much broader range of Facebook Ad Objectives that can help to ensure your ads reach the right audience(s), in the right way. 

In short, Business Manager ads offer the complete package when it comes to Instagram and Facebook advertising. 

Should I be using Boosted Posts in my Instagram and Facebook advertising?

The case for:

Boosted Posts offer a very accessible and quick way of getting your ads and content out to a bigger audience than you can achieve through purely organic means. 

Boosted Posts are open to anyone running a page and in just a few clicks of a button you can have your content reach far more people than it would normally 

This provides a great option for smaller businesses who might be tight for time yet want to get their brand or products out there using social media advertising. 

They also provide some of the targeting options that you can get through Business Manager ads. You are able to implement Interest targeting and the ability to narrow audiences. This gives you the ability to be more focused around who your ads are shown to.  

Why you shouldn’t use Boosted Ads in your Instagram and Facebook advertising?

The case against:

Boosted Posts offer the ability to use some of the ad targeting options offered by Business Manager. Some, but by no means all. 

While setting up ads through Business Manager might seem daunting, there is so much more you can do with it compared to the Boost options:

1) You can run whatever type of ads you want

Boosted Posts – particularly on Instagram – give a limited amount of options in terms of what you can achieve.

Business Manager ads offer 13 different options – called Objectives – that range from brand awareness to in-store sales. These Objectives are designed to produce more of the results you need as a business. 

2) You can test what works

If you’re using Boosted Posts, then you are only showing one ad to one audience. With Business Manager ads, you can run multiple ads to multiple audiences to test out what the best way of communicating with your target audience is. 

3) You can fully utilise Custom and Lookalike Audiences

Custom and Lookalike Audiences are made from people who have performed an action in relation to your brand before e.g. visited your website / bought your product.

Through Boosted Posts, you can only use Custom and Lookalike audiences if you’re trying to reach as many people as possible.

This means your ads are not optimised towards getting your audience to perform a specific action – other than looking at your ad.

With Business Manager ads your ability to use Custom and Lookalike audiences is far greater, which typically leads to far better returns and performance from your ads. 

Social Acumen opinion on Boosted Posts 

Boosted Posts can seem like a viable way for you to run social media advertising. However, relying on this to get your brand or messages out there can limit your advertising abilities – almost to the point where the money you’re spending is at risk of not achieving what you need. 

Running Facebook and Instagram advertising through Business Manager opens up a much more advanced way of marketing your brand or products to your target audience, your prospects and your existing customers. 

Doing so will make your marketing much more intuitive and relevant to where your prospects are on their way to becoming a customer. 

Your opinion on Boosted Posts 

So how’s it going for you? 

Have you boosted posts without seeing much of a result? Have you smashed sales out of the park only using promoted posts on Facebook? 

We’d love to hear from you as to how you’ve found this approach to social media advertising and whether you’ve found better results in Business Manager or not.