Should I Use The Facebook Boost Button To Promote My Restaurant?

The digital marketing world has drastically changed since the introduction of Facebook advertising, and if you’ve used Facebook advertising for your business, chances are that you’ve clicked the “Boost Post” button a time or two. And why wouldn’t you want to boost your Facebook post, it’s the best way to get the post in front of a bunch of people, right?

Well, I have some news for you. Each time you click that “Boost Post” button, you’re essentially throwing money in the trash. Some have wasted hundreds, and even thousands of dollars on boosting their Facebook posts.

When Facebook first released their advertising platform, it was very challenging for the average business owner to learn the ropes and really get started with Facebook advertising. In response to this, Facebook came up with the “Promote Post” button, creating the ability to start an advertising campaign without ever leaving your Facebook page.

A few years later, “Promote Post” turned into “Boost Post” as a result of some minor updates. But the process basically remained the same – offer a quick and easy way for business owners to create an advertising campaign at the click of a button.

As the organic reach for Facebook pages dwindled down over the years (now at barely any reach at all), hoards of business owners began fanatically clicking that “Boost Post” button as an attempt to get their content in front of more viewers. Although doing this is fast and easy, it is not smart.

So what actually happens when you boost a post?

After going to your Facebook page and clicking the “Boost Post” button for the post you want to advertise, Facebook then gives you the options to choose your audience, budget, and campaign duration.

What you don’t realize during this process if that Facebook just created an ad campaign in your personal account with the objective set as “Page Post Engagement.” It chooses all the defaults for you and this is a major mistake.

Why You Should Not Boost Your Posts

Facebook optimizes all your ad campaigns depending on which objective you choose.

If you choose the “Website Clicks” objective, Facebook optimizes the campaign for link clicks to your website. If the objective is “Website Conversions,” Facebook will analyze each person already converted and will put your campaign in front of similar people rather than random placement.

But, if you boost a Facebook post, Facebook automatically optimizes it to get the most post engagement, meaning they only optimize for more likes, shares, comments, etc. Sometimes, if that really is your main objective for the post, then this can be (almost) okay. But this still doesn’t give you control of the ad placement.

So even if you decided to boost a link post, Facebook would still only optimize it for engagement rather than link clicks.

Even if your ad does get a ton of post likes, you need to keep in mind that this is due to very broad targeting, and chances are only a small fraction will click through to your website, event page, or landing page.

When advertising it should never be about getting likes and engagement. It’s always about conversions and sales. You want results… Period.

Limited Targeting Options

Facebook boost post targeting provides you with three options:

1. People who like your page – advertising to all your fans
2. People who like your page and their friends – advertising to all your fans and all their friends
3. People you choose through targeting – advertising to a specific target audience you choose

Let’s go through these options real quick:

People Who Like Your Page:

If your page hasn’t attracted high-quality page likes (most businesses haven’t), you’ll be immediately wasting your money because you could target to a much more specific, optimized audience.

People Who Like Your Page and Their Friends:

Regardless if your page has super relevant likes or not, you’ll still be wasting your money. The friends of fans audience can have up to a million or more people in it, and most won’t be within the appropriate radius of your business because their “friends” can be all over the world.

People You Choose With Targeting:

Although this sounds great because you can choose the specific interests of the audience, the targeting choices they provide you are still very limited. For example, when doing this you can’t choose any behaviors. You can’t utilize detailed targeting to reach people who are interested in Interest A and Interest B. Also, you can’t exclude or include your page fans or custom audiences from your targeting.

No matter which targeting option you choose, you will be throwing your money in the trash. Whether it’s 10% or 30% of your budget, it can add up to thousands of advertising dollars wasted.

And finally, arguably the most important part, you can’t control the placements of the ads you pay for.

No Control Over Ad Placements:

When boosting posts, you can’t choose where you want to show your ads – the default option is always Desktop News Feed and Mobile News Feed.

You already know Facebook does a ton of optimization on each ad campaign for you. Most of the time their algorithms will attempt to find the cheapest way to achieve your objective, even if it might ruin your overall campaign results. They love to show you tons of likes and engagement as a mirage, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into real results.

For example, let’s say you are wanting to promote a live event for your business and you’re wanting to sell tickets for it. Boosting the post will advertise to both Desktop and Mobile News Feed, but unfortunately might push as much as 99% of the budget to the Mobile News Feed option (because it’s less expensive than the Desktop News Feed), regardless of whether it’s getting you what you want, which is sales.

From our experience, even if a website is completely mobile-optimized and responsive, the conversion rate on mobile is usually 2 to 3 times lower than on desktop. Mobile conversions tend to be lower because it’s just not as convenient to fill in all the sign-up or purchase information on mobile devices. And if the website is not mobile-friendly, this can be much worse.

So, when choosing both placements (something you can’t control with the “Boost Post” option), you’ll probably be getting a ton of mobile traffic that converts very poorly. And if you’re trying to drive people from Facebook to your event page, your landing page, your website, your products/services, or anywhere else outside of Facebook, then you need conversions, not likes.

And don’t forget Instagram. You can now control Instagram advertising from the Facebook Ad Manager. You can’t do this when boosting a post. And anytime you’re actually going for the engagement objective, we suggest adding Instagram as an ad placement (always disable right side column) so you can get likes on Instagram and reach those who aren’t on Facebook to see your ad.

What Can You Do About It?

You can stop using the “Boost Post” button unless you actually enjoy throwing money in the trash.

Whatever type of business you may own, the audience you want to reach can be reached more effectively by creating ads in the Ads Manager or Power Editor.

Yes, it may take you a bit longer, but you’ll be able to choose the campaign objective that makes the most sense for your advertising campaign, you’ll be able to select much more refined and relevant audiences, and you’ll have complete control on the placements of your ads.

Combined, all these things will result in saving you thousands of advertising dollars and will produce a much better return on your investment.

In the end, your goal should not be to just get the most engagement, but to get people to take an action – whether that’s visiting your website, signing up for an event, opting-in with their email for a contest, or simply coming to your business – and you should do everything you can to achieve these results in the most effective way.