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Right, let’s take a closer look at these two options.

Boosting posts:

This is such a simple thing to do to raise awareness of your brand, an event, a specific product, a particular service or any other content which is relevant to your social media marketing strategy.  All you have to do is choose an existing post which you have already posted (and is sitting on your Facebook business page) and boost it by clicking on the ‘boost’ button.

You can do this to enable the post to reach more people than it would without normally, and if you wanted to reach a  different set of people.

Facebook will send this post to the people it knows are most likely to interact with it, within the target parameters you’ve set. You’ll definitely see a lot more likes and comments than usual, but it’s unlikely that the people who see it will turn into active customers. Facebook are showing it to people who are likely to interact with posts not necessarily people who are likely to buy from you.

You may think it’s done well as it’s reached a lot more people than those that like your page and you’ve had good interaction, but ask yourself did you get business from it?

Remember that a  boosted post is one that already exists on your business page. Ask yourself, do the kind of adverts that you want to boost the kind that you want to fill your feed and for all of your regular followers to see? You could be in danger of your followers getting fed up of seeing constant ‘ads’ – they’ll want to see posts which add value to them too.

Facebook ads:

To run a Facebook ad you need to register with Business Manager – a fantastic Facebook marketing tool that helps you to organise and manage your long term business strategies.

Don’t worry, this is really simple to do. When you head to Business Manager, you’ll be on a different platform from Facebook itself where you will see the most amazing targeting opportunities.

Unlike boosts, your Facebook ad will never be added to your business page. So, you can sell to your heart’s content knowing that you’ll not put off any of your loyal followers who love you for your tips, advice, support, human stories and the other organic posts that you create that add value.

Ads are great for generating leads and getting sales as you can drill down and target exactly who you want to. There are many more options for targeting than you get with just a boosted post.

For example, you can create lookalike audiences. Audiences who share the same interests, demographic, traits, likes, dislikes, etc, to your web visitors or people on your email list.  Imagine that – you’d pay a market researcher a fortune to do this work for you! But by simply downloading your email list onto Facebook it instantly creates a similar new audience for you, based on who’s already interacted with your brand.  

When you reach out to this set off people you will know that what you are offering them will be of huge interest as they’re similar to your existing customers.