If you use Facebook and/or Instagram to promote your business, you may have been tempted by the “boost” (formerly “promote”) button. And after all, why not? Growing your account and your audience organically can be quite a time-consuming process and if you can put just a little bit of money behind a post for it to get more visibility, why not? Seems like a great idea.

If only it were that easy….

Here are three reasons why boosting a post is not a good idea:

You have way less access to targeting.
The beauty of real Facebook and Instagram ads is that you can get really specific about who you want to reach with your ads. You can target your existing audience, find new people similar to your existing audience, or target by interest and be as specific as “women between 30-50 who shop at Whole Foods have a dog and listen to Frank Sinatra”. When we talk about boosting, barely a fraction of that is available to you.

The second reason is your objective.
When running Facebook and Instagram ads, choosing the right objective is a huge part of success because it will determine what action the algorithm will prioritize from the audience. In other words, if you ask the algorithm to find people who will “like” your post it will prioritize that or if you ask it to find people who will purchase from you, it will pay attention to the purchases. So even with an identical audience, ad, and everything else, with two different objectives, your results will be very different. With all of that being said, when it comes to boosting, the only default objective you have is “engagement” aka likes and comments. As much as likes can be great for our ego, the truth is, likes do nothing for our business and bank account.

Personal VS Business Account.
The last reason I want to mention here is that when you are boosting right from your phone, it’s going to use your personal ad account. Versus, when you create a proper business manager and ad account, your ad account would be connected to your business first rather than to you personally. Think about this as opening an LLC for your business vs just operating as a person. If for whatever reason your ad account is deactivated… with a personal ad account, this affects your whole Facebook and Instagram account and you won’t be able to advertise…AT ALL, unless you create a new fake account and even then it’s a lot of headaches. If, on the other hand, it’s an ad account assigned to a business… you can create a different ad account, you can create a new business manager, and there are more ways around it that would not require you to change your main personal account.

So, now that we’ve covered why you shouldn’t boost a post, let me share with you:

The best way to start running Facebook and Instagram ads in 2022.
You may or may not have heard about the IOS 14 Update and its potential effects on the performance of ads and the gloomy predictions people make: “Facebook ads are dead!”…

While FB & IG Ads are in no way dead, it’s important to understand what the IOS Update does and how you can get around it.

The IOS Update significantly impacts the tracking abilities of your website, so when you are driving people to a landing page, the results are not going to be as accurate in the ads manager and as a result, it’s much harder for the campaign to optimize which in turn affects the results you can get.

Yes, the Meta company is working on a number of solutions to this issue such as verifying your domain, domain events, etc… However, if you don’t want to mess with a lot of tech at this stage, there is a simple solution to this:

Keep People On The Platform.
Right now, there are a few ad adjectives like a message or lead form where you can encourage people to take an action without leaving Facebook or the Instagram platform, which means:

• the algorithm gets a lot better data,
• optimizes better and
• gets lower cost per result.

A win-win all around.

Not only that, when you are using a Lead Form, because it is inside of the platform, it pre-populates the name and email which brings the conversion rate to almost 50% compared to 30%-40% of a standard landing page.

AND! You have the ability to add a link on the last page of the form to direct people to your website/ FB group/ Podcast etc, once they have filled out the form.

Here’s a quick example: