Why the Facebook Boost Button is a waste of money
Facebook has become a pay to play platform for most businesses and with the rollout of the Facebook engagement bait algorithm update, this doesn’t look to be changing anytime soon. Watching that organic reach fail to make any impact week after week, it can be tempting to hit that ‘Boost’ button – but you shouldn’t and here is why
It’s a waste of money
It’s fairly common in the web industry to hear business owners running their own Facebook pages say Facebook adverts are a waste of money. The problem here is that their experience of Facebook advertising is limited to that boost button. The boost section actually offers a very limited targeting approach for advertising and compared to Facebook’s actual advertising tools or Googles.
When you spend money on Boosts with limited targeting you’re essentially treating your marketing budget like spaghetti thrown at the wall and hoping some of it will stick. You might get some sales or leads from it but ultimately you could have done a lot better.
The Facebook boost button was initially created as Facebook knew that business owners wouldn’t have the technical or marketing knowledge to take full advantage of their targeting features so they created a simplified version for ease of use. Since then it’s become a huge cash grab for them so they’re likely not going to push business owners to try the more in-depth targeting anytime soon.
The worst part about the ‘Boost’ Feature is its primary marketing objective – ie how it decides how your budget is spent is to drive engagement to the post, not the website linked or the primary goal of the advert. So you could end up literally spending your hard earned marketing budget… for likes.
What to use instead
Use the Facebook Ad Manager – Immediately once you open it up if you’re a first time user, you’ll notice how much more in-depth the adverts become. You can set your marketing objective and gain full control of the targeting, which with a company such as Facebook which users have divulged basically all their personal information to – becomes a very powerful tool indeed.
It takes some marketing knowledge to take full advantage of these tools so if you’re not feeling 100% about it or find it too complicated then it’s much better to hire a proven digital marketer for x amount per month than use the boost feature. If however, you do decide to use these tools then it’s best practice to run multiple smaller campaigns to test conversion (try same text different pictures etc) than it is to starting spending big straight away. This way you can decipher which has the best conversion rate for your chosen marketing goals and invest more heavily in that. Facebook Ad manager actually comes with built-in variable testing to make this process simpler and save you money by automatically selecting the winning conversion advert set.
Whilst it does take more time to learn this interface than a simple page boost, the returns will be much more worthwhile.