To Boost? Or Not To Boost? Boosted Vs Promoted Posts On Facebook

4 min readMar 17, 2018

Aaaaah Facebook. Don’t you miss the days when you didn’t have to pay for engagement? When there was plenty of reach to go around and you didn’t have to empty out your wallet to build a decent following?

Not Anymore!

Building a following takes more than your blood, sweat, and tears. But now Facebook wants your hard earned money!

So to help you get the most bang for your buck, I thought I’d educate y’all on the difference between boosted posts and promoted posts.

Boosted Posts

I’m sure you’ve seen the “boost post” button at the bottom of your posts in your feed. And Facebook REALLY wants you to push that button by saying “This post is performing better than 80% of your other content bla bla bla”

Boosting a post is very similar to setting up a standard ad. You have some features to select your audience and configure your budget.

But that’s about it.

When a post is boosted, the only thing it’s doing is increasing the reach of that post. That means you are getting charged when you’re ad appears on someone’s timeline. That’s all.

Promoted Posts

Promoted posts, unlike boosted posts, give you all the features of the power editor. This means you have WAY more options for setting advertising goals for your post.

For example, maybe you have a blog post that has an opt-in form at the end. You want to track how many email signups you get as a result of that blog post. You can set your ad campaign goal to track “conversions” and setup your Facebook Pixel to track completed signups from your optin form.

I’m not going to get into how you actually set that up. That’s for another post.

Anyway, so instead of monitoring how many eyeballs have seen your post, you can actually track how many people clicked on your link, opted in to your email campaign, and how much it costs per completed registration.

You can’t do that with a boosted post.

How to promote an existing post instead of boosting it

1 : Go to your ads manager and create a new ad

2: Select your campaign goal. NOTE: If you select engagement as your campaign goal, DO NOT select page likes. This will not allow you to promote an existing post

3: After you’ve configured your ad budget and audience targeting, Click the “use existing post” tab. This will allow you to pick any post on your news feed.

4: After you’ve selected your post to promote, you can configure your Facebook pixel( also for another article ) if you wish and publish!

Dark Posting

So here’s a cool thing you can do with Facebook ads

Say you want to make a Facebook post, but you want to run an experiment with your ad copy. Maybe try out a different writing voice or experiment with graphics.

You can create a single image ad ( or a couple for testing purposes ) and let them run under your target audience. Since these are Facebook ads and not boosted posts, they will not appear on your page’s timeline.

This is also good if you have content that you want to promote but you don’t think it would be appropriate for your timeline

Conclusion: Think about your ad goals

If you’re just looking to put more eyeballs on your posts and you want to get used to Facebook ads, boosting is a great option.

But if you want more options with your ad, or want to use your post as part of your sales funnel and need more advanced tracking options, promoting your post is the way to go.