When speaking with clients we often receive questions about the difference between a Facebook Business Page’s posts, boosted posts and paid advertising because Facebook offers many ways for businesses to reach their customers.
Facebook Business Pages
With your Facebook business page, you can post pictures, videos, links and plain text. Posting as your business is free, but those updates will not reach all of the people who have liked your business page. There are so many businesses and people on Facebook, that it would be overwhelming to a user to see every single thing that every page they like posts, so Facebook has created an algorithm to determine who sees each post that a business makes. The amount of people who see your business’s posts is called organic reach; organic reach is down 20% in 2017 . This means fewer people than ever are seeing the posts that your business publishes.
Facebook Boosted Posts
This is where boosted posts and paid advertising come in. Boosted posts are like the gateway between organic posts and a paid ad. Let’s say your business is hosting a grand opening event and you want to make sure all of the people who like your page see your post about it. When you publish the post, you will see an option to boost the post. You can choose a small budget of $10 and select the audience that you’d like to view your post, limiting it to just people who like your page or expanding it to other people who fall within demographics that you specify like: gender, age, location, interests, demographics and behaviors. You can also specify how long you’d like the post to be boosted for. Once you’ve selected all of your options Facebook will tell you how many people fit your criteria and how many you will reach with your selected budget. Boosted posts will be shown in the newsfeed. When you boost a post, Facebook tells your customers by denoting “Sponsored” under your business name on the post.
Facebook Paid Advertising
Your third option to reach customers through Facebook is a paid ad campaign. This is by far the most complicated offering and provides a multitude of possibilities. To begin these, you navigate away from your page and to the Facebook Ads Manager. Ads can be shown in the newsfeed, on Instagram (even if your business doesn’t have an Instagram account), on the right side of the desktop newsfeed and in something called the audience network. The audience network is a group of websites that have agreed to let Facebook ads be shown on their sites. It increases the reach of the ads. When running an ad campaign on Facebook you will reach more people and have a more finely tuned target audience than with boosted or organic reach posts. The same “Sponsored” notice appears on paid ads.
Right away you’ll notice the difference between a regular Facebook post and an ad. There’s a step-by-step process that begins with defining your objective for the ad. You’ll be asked to define your audience and are given many more demographic targeting options than with a boosted post. And finally you’ll have the opportunity to create the ad itself which can take on a multitude of formats. The options for creative are so diverse that Facebook has recently launched something called the Creative Hub for both assistance and inspiration.
Between paid ads, boosted posts and organic reach, there’s always a way to connect with your customers, and reach your prospective customers, on Facebook. If you’d like to learn more about how Facebook can make a serious impact on your lead volume, give us a call, 410-584-2500. We’re eager to help.
