Facebook Ads Manager Vs Boosting Posts

Which is better?

Anyone who runs a business knows they must have a brand presence on Social Media to reach new segments, support existing customers and be part of the conversation happening around their brand and the wider industry they’re a part of.

And something else that’s abundantly clear is that organic reach just isn’t what it used to be. Once upon a time, you could post on your business page and your fans had a good chance of seeing it in their newsfeeds.

Both Facebook’s big Social platforms (Facebook and Instagram) have been declining organic reach for brands for some time, meaning business owners who want to generate higher reach have been opening their wallets.

But this isn’t the only reason people choose paid distribution methods. It may be that your target audience is quite specific, requiring a more targeted approach that organic Social posting can achieve.

Or perhaps you’ve created some amazing content, why take the risk of minimal exposure?

Get it out there!

If your video auto-plays in the forest, and no-one is there to read the captions – did it even play at all?

Deciding to promote your content isn’t the hard part, but how to do it effectively can be confusing. So let’s look at the difference between Ads Manager and Boosting Posts!

There’s a little bit of jargon to learn when paying to distribute your content on Facebook (and Instagram) and the first thing is that Boosting Posts and Sponsoring a post via Ads Manager are quite different.

Facebook Boosted Posts

Facebook’s defines a boosted post as:

“…a post to your Page’s timeline that you can apply money to in order to boost it to an audience of your choosing. This is the simplest way to advertise on Facebook.”

Boosting a Facebook post is straightforward as pressing the blue “Boost Post” button under the post you’d like to put the budget behind and following the prompts.

Boosted Posts start off as organic posts – and have budgets applied.

Facebook Ads Manager

Running ads via Facebook Ads Manager gives you more control over your campaign.

Facebook describes it this way:

“Facebook ads are created through Ads Manager and offer more advanced customization solutions. There are many advertising objectives to help you reach your specific business goals and the audiences you care about most.

Where a boosted post may initially optimize for Page likes, comments, and shares or overall brand awareness, Facebook ads can optimize for app installs, website conversions, video views, shop orders and more.”

Running Ads via Facebook Ads Manager requires an Ad Account, preferably set up inside a Business Manager account set up for your business.

You’ll get access to more robust targeting, more features, and greater support from running ads this way.

Running ads via Ads Manager means they don’t ever display on your page itself unless you deliberately share them there.

Here’s a breakdown of the other differences.

Image credit: Social Media Today

Running ads via Ads Manager will give you access to many objective options, under 3 main headings.

Awareness:

Brand Awareness
Reach

Consideration:

Traffic
Engagement
App Installs
Video Views
Lead Generation
Messages

Conversions:

Conversion
Catalogue Sales
Store Visits

Boosting posts will only give you 3 ad objectives; website visits, Engagement and Messages.

So now that we know the difference, which is better?

It depends exactly what you want to achieve.

Facebook explains it this way:

“It’s important for any business to identify exactly what they’re hoping to achieve with an ad.

For example, if you want audience engagement on your Page or to develop your brand awareness, boosting a post is a great way to maximize visibility and grow your audience.

To create more advanced ad types and campaigns, use Ads Manager.

In almost all instances, running ads via Facebook Ads Manager is preferable to boosting posts.”

Boosting Posts is certainly quicker, easier, and requires a less steep learning curve.

But there’s only 3 times I’d ever use it myself

If I wanted my content to only be seen by people who already like my page

Seems counterintuitive, but if you were offering a promotion or discount to your page fans only the most effective way to do this is via a boosted post to current fans of your page.

If you already have your Facebook Custom Audiences set up in Ads Manager

You can access your Custom Audiences and Saved Audiences in your Boost Post options if they have already been created in your Ads Manager. This way you have the same targeting options, and it’s quick and easy to promote your post on the go.

For Social Proof on your Ads

If you’re going to run an ad that’s possible to do as a Facebook post (E.g. Engagement, Link Clicks) you can create first as a post on your page, and Boost to build up reactions, comments and other Social Proof before running as an ad via Ads Manager.

In all other instances I’ll take the extra objective and targeting options of Ads Manager any day of the week!

The other point to note with Boosting Posts is that it’s only effective if your post meets certain parameters.

If your post has performed well organically
A clear call to action – don’t leave people confused over what to do
It’s relevant, timely and optimised for your target audience

Boosting a post that doesn’t have these factors is a complete waste of your Facebook Ads budget!

Ads Manager Advantages

Controlling who sees your ads (and who doesn’t) is one of the main attractions to advertising on Facebook – not using this targeting to its full potential isn’t making the most out of your Facebook ads budget.

Not only is it counterintuitive to use the more limited targeting of Boosted Posts, but placement options are incredibly important to running successful Facebook ad campaigns. Placements determine where your ad is displayed. Will your target market be more likely to be compelled by your ad in Messenger, on Instagram Stories, or Facebook’s mobile newsfeed?

Something else that’s important to achieving a return on ad spends (ROAS) is split testing – which you can’t do with Boosted Posts. How will you know which creative works best, what copy inspires people to click, which placements are most effective if you can’t split test them?

Plus, Ads Manager can do almost everything Boosted posts can do!

In fact – following this process will give you the same result as a Boosted Post (for the Engagement objective) but with more robust targeting options:

In Ads Manager, click the green “create” button and select “Engagement” as an objective
Choose “Post Engagement”
Define your Audience, Placements and Budget
Click the drop-down menu to designate a pre-existing post
Confirm & launch

This method generates better results, at a more cost-effective rate. Go ahead and put it to the test – I’m confident you’ll appreciate learning how to promote a post on Facebook using the platform’s Ads Manager tool.

Using Facebook Ads Manager to run your advertising is a lot to get used to, but when you’re going to be paying Facebook to find your target audience isn’t it worth spending some time familiarising yourself with the platform that’ll get you the most bang for your buck?

I’d love to know what you think! Drop me a comment.

This article was originally published on SavvySME

August 31, 2016October 31, 2018

Facebook interests examined | Have you lost interest?

What on earth does Facebook know about me?

Why am I seeing these ads?

If you want to see what Facebook thinks your “interests” are you can have a look and edit them. You’ll have a good laugh at the things you apparently like!

Go to Settings > Ads > Ads based on my preferences > edit > visit ad preferences. Then they will all be neatly displayed in little boxes. You can hover and close the ones you aren’t actually interested in.

It can be a lengthy process – but very eye-opening! This is a great experiment to do on your profile to show you why interest targeting on Facebook can be so hit and miss. You’re must better off using custom audiences based on your website traffic or email databases!

This won’t mean you’ll see fewer FB ads, but it might mean the ones you do see are relevant to you! And let’s face it, we’ve all come to terms with the fact that there’s ads on Facebook. PLUS occasionally you’ll see an ad for a flight, concert, or something that you ARE interested in and you didn’t already know about. Ok, it’s infrequent – but it does happen.

What do you think? Did you find this useful? Is it time to update your interests on Facebook, I mean it’s more than 12 years old now – and if you’ve been on it since the beginning you might have changed a bit since then!

March 2, 2016August 17, 2019

Social Media Marketing loves your Email Database (and vice versa) – How & Why you should let them be together

I like to say Email Database Marketing and Social Media Marketing are best friends. Let’s explore why your business benefits from the combined power of these 2 digital marketing methods – especially if you have a small marketing budget!

I’ve collected some awesome articles from some digital marketing heavyweights to help convince you that you can’t have ultimate success in one without the other, and how to go about setting up this integrated approach!

Neil Patel describes Social Media as “the new kid” and explains why and how to integrate your email and social marketing, he even includes a downloadable cheat sheet in his article “How to Integrate Email Marketing With Your Social Media Efforts” it’s a long read but includes many step-by-step instructions, screen shots and stats to get you started.

Neil starts by demonstrating that Email Marketing is one of the easiest and most effective digital tactics, and is far from “dead”

Top Takeaways from Neils’ Article

Social Media and Email Marketing work together because they serve different contexts to different sections of your target audience.

Email is a closer relationship with your customer because they have given you permission to enter their inbox. Social Media is public and therefore less close; but a great way to collect those valuable email subscribers, and re-target them.

Email has a higher customer lifetime value (CLV) than social media platforms.

You can increase your email content exposure by including social share icons inside your emails. As per Get Response, social sharing boosts email CTR by 158%.

His Step-by-Step guides to uploading your email database to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn

Then his subsequent Step-by-Step guide to using these lists to target specific advertising messages or paid advertising – RETARGETING.

Social Media tips:

Use contests to collect email addresses
Use your cover page ‘call to action’ buttons to collect subscribers
Use Facebook Groups for subscriber-only interaction
Retargeting

Email Marketing Tips:

Use photos to ‘put a face to the name’ in your emails
Use unsubscribe prompts to try not to lose subscribers
Add an email sign-up to your website and social media channels
Use social media sharing buttons/links in your emails and prompt your subscribers to follow/like you

Read the whole original article:

How to Integrate Email Marketing With Your Social Media Efforts

Next is Buffer. Buffer is a Social Media Scheduling tool, helping you post content across multiple channels easily – a handy tool indeed!

They also write a very informative blog, which has just been named Social Media Examiner’s Top Ten Social Media Blogs.

In this post titled “6 Creative ways to integrate Social Media and Email Marketing” they give away some little-known tactics to getting more traffic and engagement by combining the power of Social Media and Email – and again this article is packed with practical how to’s!

Top Takeaways from Buffer’s Article

Few people make buying decisions anymore based on information from a single medium. So when marketers focus all their energy on one channel, they could be missing out on other opportunities and the natural rhythms of the buying cycle.

You need Email and Social Media to cross-promote your products and services, it re-enforces your messaging and makes sure you remain top of mind when your audience are ready to purchase.

They outline 6 top tips – which are:

Upload Email Database to Social Media Channels (as we discussed – but they add Google+)
Retargeting (we’ll leave this one here too)
Let Social Send Emails For You – this one is new, let’s discuss below
Automation – we have covered this, but Buffer suggest a different tactic which we’ll explore further in a moment
Collect Emails from Social Media – via lead magnet or subscription app/Facebook call to action in the cover photo
Create a Facebook Group for Subscribers – covered

So, we’ve already discussed some of these points above – let’s move straight on to number 3 in our list, Let Social Send Emails For You, how does this work? They’re talking about LinkedIn Groups!

If you are on LinekdIn and you haven’t taken the time to manually unsubscribe from every group you have joined you are probably drowning under a sea of LinekdIn emails…

LinkedIn send email updates of group discussions, so all you need to do to reach someone’s inbox (rather than the folder or burner email we all use for email sign-ups) is to contribute your content to these group discussions.

Now obviously you can’t just post your content and run, and it has to be of value to the group members. But what a novel idea! I hadn’t thought of trying this tactic but I’ll definitely be giving it a go myself. I’ll let you know how it turns out 🙂

On point number 4, Automation Buffer use a tactic I also haven’t tried before.

It goes like this; post a social media update, send it to your email database prompting them to share it (they call it “seed it with shares”) and once the share count is up nice and high, send an email to influencers to share it.

The influencers will see the value of the content due to the “seeded” shares and will be more likely to share it to their own audiences. Buffer describe a tool called Send Bloom which integrates with Gmail and allows you to send these influencer emails automatically.

Not only a total time-saver, but coming from your Gmail makes it so much more personal!

Just quickly we’ll discuss a Lead Magnet as mentioned in number 5 of our list, it’ll be discussed at length in the final article and is an integral part of Digital Marketing!

A Lead Magnet is something people will be prepared to give up their email address for – thus making them a lead. An example of this could be a downloadable how-to guide or indeed Neil Patel’s Cheat Sheet discussed in the first section of this article!

kh-facebook-ad-lead-magnet — Example of a Lead Magent turned into a Facebook Ad

Most people won’t subscribe to your emails without being offered something of value, so think about what you could use as a lead magnet for your business!

If you want to dig in deeper the full article link is below.

6 Creative ways to integrate Social Media and Email Marketing

One of my favourite Social Media Marketing resources – Social Media Examiner has many, many articles regarding Social Media and Email Marketing integration. Here is one of their most recent publications on the subject, written by Kristi Hines.

This one’s called “How to Improve Your Email Marketing With Social Media” and covers Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter again, with helpful screen shots and how to’s.

It’s focus is on improving the strength of your email database using social media.

Top Takeaways from Social Media Examiner’s Article

Promote your Lead Magnet, or Resources section of your website on your social media channels – so people land on your “squeeze page” (the landing page you make to collect their email in exchange for your Lead Magnet/Resource) resulting in subscriber growth.

Also use your Social Media channels to test headlines to use in your Email Marketing. As you re-post your content (not everyone saw it the first time, right?) you can change-up the titles and images.

You can infer that the one with the most engagement is the “best” one and use these headlines when creating your emails.

Here’s some more tips, broken down by channel.

Facebook

Include your subscribe link in your Short Description
Make an app to collect email addresses (try WooBox or ShortStack for this)
Use your Call To Action button on your Cover Photo
Set up Facebook Ads to your Lead Magnet/Squeeze Page
Use a Lookalike Audience to target people who “Look Like” your email database subscribers

Twitter

Use your bio to promote your Lead Magnet
Use Twitter Lead Cards – explained below
Use Promoted Tweets to increase the reach of your Lead Cards

A Lead Card is a way for people to leave you with their details without leaving Twitter. Think of it as a mini-squeeze page.

LinkedIn

Promote your Lead Magnet in the Projects and Publications sections of your LinkedIn profile

Pinterest

Pin your Lead Magnet – this can be done multiple times with varying images.

Instagram

Use the link in your bio to send people to your Lead Magnet/Squeeze Page

General

Make sharing easy! Include Social Media sharing buttons and links on your Squeeze Page and your Lead Magnet.

Read the full article, explaining exactly how to set up your Twitter Lead Cards below.

How to Improve Your Email Marketing With Social Media

So here you have it – the world’s top Digital Marketers agree that Social Media and Email Marketing are best friends! Time to dig out that excel spreadsheet and pass it on to your social media team!

We’d love to hear your feedback! What are your thoughts on Email Marketing and Social Media integration? Leave us a comment here or stop by any of our Social Media channels.

The Social Chameleons can be contacted to help you with your Social Media and Email Database Marketing. Feel free to email by clicking here, or fill out the form on the contact page.