Most businesses in Dubai have tried advertising in Facebook. There are generally two types of Facebook ads, boosted post and Facebook ads. Both are methods of pushing your content to people to Facebook network and paying a for the delivery of this content. Boosting is the much easier choice compared to Facebook ads in which you might need a dedicated manager to run your ads.

Let’s first understand the history of Facebook advertising. Ten years ago, Facebook’s advertising platform was still in its early stages, and it seemed complicated for many business owners. Therefore, in 2012, Facebook introduced a super simple way to promote its own content-“Promote Post”. With the advent of this application, it is easy to create an advertising campaign by promoting a certain post. A few years later, “Promote Post” was renamed “Boost Post”, and it was further updated and upgraded. However, Boost Post still continues the essence of Promote Post—providing a fast and simple way to make posts attract more people by just spending money.

How to boost a Facebook post?

Go to the Facebook Page and find the post you want to promote. Then ensure that you are set with a goal. Then click Boost post.

1. Choose a Promotion goal:

1. Attract more users to participate in the interaction, that is, comment, share, and leave a like.
2. Get more users to send messages, that is, send messages to you through Facebook.
3. Let more people  to like your page.

2. Select Your Audience (interests, hobbies, age, gender)

3. Select your location (region, location)

4. Select your budget and duration. (please note that the minimum daily budget in the UAE is 4.17 AED per day)

Click “Boost” to speed up the post.

Congratulations, you have successfully posted an ad for a boosted post. The operation is very simple, but why don’t we use Boost Post. It wastes my money and time to be honest, but why does Facebook launch this feature? For more advertising profit of course, because it is simple to operate, one does not need to spend high wages to hire professional optimizers to operate complex advertising accounts. As far as Facebook is concerned, it can earn more. Facebook’s advertising revenue in 2019 Nearly 70 billion U.S. dollars. We are also one of the contributors.

Boosting Post – Limits your target selection.

Facebook’s Boost Post has only three options in the choice of target audience:

1. People who like your page

This option makes your post be viewed by people who like you page. Usually done for retargeting or pushing for a promotion, but if you only have a handful of followers why will you choose this as you want to gain more page likes.

2. People who like your page and their friends

This audience will make you run a campaign that will be shared to your existing follower and their friends. This provides you a slow but steady growth for your audience. It more at first but you spend lesser and lesser the more your networks grow. This however limits your post initial traction.

3. Customize the target audience

This is the last audience you can use and very useful as you can choose a set of audience that is in the Facebook network. Like demographics, location and country. This however is still limited to the customization and actual targeting that you would like to do to make your ad relevant to your customer base. Plus, this is also the most expensive out of the 3 audience you use.

For example, you cannot choose the specific performance of the audience, nor can you have a detailed audience like setting up an A/B test. You also cannot choose audiences who are interested in multiple interest.  Choose an audiences who are interested in one specific category. You can’t exclude your existing followers from this list too, nor can you further refine your audience based on a certain demographic. This is why boosting is limited as people are vying for the same type of audience.

Boosting Posts – You have limited control on your ads

Facebook will automatically perform a lot of optimization for you, and in most cases, Facebook’s optimization algorithm is to find the cheapest way possible for advertising, even if it will destroy the effectiveness of your overall advertising.

For example, if your target audience is many countries or regions, the end result may be that most of your budget is invested in the cheapest countries and regions. The same situation also includes gender, age, etc., as well as ad placement.

This is why boosting a post is not as effective as having a full Facebook business ad account. Ad accounts give you a better way to use your budget on converting audiences and target certain behaviors that Facebook have. Unlike google and other social platforms, Facebook has the data to know the lives of each users as users proactively provide them with hashtags, locations, friend tagging and more. In boosting a posts, you are at the behest of Facebook machine learning systems in which its goal is generate more ad revenue rather than build business for you.

Boosting post Vs. Ad manager accounts

1. Getting engagement to your page.

With boost post you can get engagement to your content but it only limits you to a number of audience hence not being able to maximize the cost per engagement. If you have a dedicated ad account, you can push your content to focus on engagement only and make every penny worth on each engagement.

2. Boosting a post to increase page likes/ followers

With boosting a post, you set a budget and hope that automated audience you set will ensure they like your page. This is a sink or swim tactic specially in highly competitive niche. Getting an ad account with Facebook will enable you to specifically target your audience through language, demographics, interests and more to ensure that you content reaches the correct customer base that will surely like your page. It’s like making an ad about plumbing tool to a nurse, the nurse will not be at all interested about the product, but you show it to a plumber, they will surely be interested.

3. Call to actions, website visits and overall conversion.

Having an ad account increases your overall conversion rate compared to boosting a post. In boost post, you can only track your conversion with a limited report and data. Ad accounts have power tools like Facebook pixels, specific objective that pushes your ads for conversions like store location visits, specific website actions and WhatsApp messaging.

In any advertising plan, setting up a goal is important and when doing an ad in Facebook, getting engagement like comments, likes and reactions is only a small part of social media marketing. It only achieves getting the top of the funnel audience. You want to maximize the amount you spend to convert to actual sales, app installs and website interaction as it will definitely generate revenue.

This the reason why boosting a post is not as effective if you want to advertise in Facebook. Use all the tools you need to maximize your results with minimal effort. If you want assistance on how to do marketing in social media effectively, we at AOJA Advertising will help you out. We provide the lowest but very effective rate to boost your business through social media. Click on the form here.