Give Facebook your dollar dollar bills y’all…

Truth is Facebook hasn’t been playing nice. You’ve seen it all. You put all the effort in creating interesting and read-worthy posts while it doesn’t even reach half of your audience. In the mean time Facebook loves to tweak its algorithm to make sure organic reach keeps on dropping. Why? Because Facebook wants you to pay for your audience and according to a recent Harvard Business Review study paying is the only effective way to convey information to your audience anymore.

Facebook is asking for your dollar dollar bills y’all and it is asking for it in many ways. In return it promises you more reach and thus more visibility, more clicks and hopefully, eventually an increase in sales. At a minimal cost you can advertise to highly targeted audiences — reaching that particular customer from that particular age group living in this particular area and working for that particular company is now peanuts.

But how do you find your way in the maze of the endless possibilities of targeted ads and boosted posts? To start off with: when to choose what?

Boosted posts

Boosting your posts means it is being viewed by a larger audience — more reach. You can boost your posts directly from your Facebook page but it is in fact better to do so through your Facebook Business Manager Account. This method offers way more targeting options than your Facebook page.

But when to boost a post? Research has shown that it is best to boost your post when you want people to engage on your Facebook page: more likes, more shares, more comments, … As Facebook posts are especially created for Facebook, redirecting your audience to an external webpage (let’s say your website or blog) through a boosted post, has little to no effect. Moving on…

Facebook ads

Facebook gives you a lot of options when creating an ad e.g.: send people to your website, track conversions, increase app downloads, … However, some do think this is too good to be true and not every objective suggested by Facebook has that much of a great return rate.

However, when it does and especially for redirecting people to your website, it is a cheaper alternative for Google Adwords. You can target based on interests and in case you do, make sure to add as many interests that are applicable to your audience. But beware, over time your ad, especially if you keep on using the same one over and over, will not generate as much interest as before as it is most likely targeted at the same audience. To keep track of this you should check the Cost per Click (CPC) metric.

In the end there’s no right or wrong. What might work for your company might not work for another and vice versa. Do keep in mind the following when creating ads and / or boosted posts:

• Think before you pay — do you want people to stay and engage on your Facebook page (boost) or do you want them to be redirected to an external webpage (ad)?
• A lot of pages boost image posts or use an image as an ad. Facebook, however, has a 20% text rule: no more than 20% of your image is allowed to be text. If it exceeds the 20% you won’t be able to promote your post. You can check your images via Facebook’s Grid Tool.
• Even though Facebook wants you to pay for your audience, content is still key. Good content will still have higher engagement rates. Meaning if your content is bad you might have ended up paying for a lot of views but very little interaction.
• Play around! Facebook is pretty forgiving. What doesn’t work one way might work another. Run some A/B tests to see what works for you. For example you can try Canvas as the analytics show it is pretty effective!