Here's Why You Shouldn't Boost Your Facebook Posts

Social media is an important part of any company’s marketing and advertising strategy—especially now that there are more social media users than Internet users. If your business has a Facebook page, you might be wondering whether you should boost the posts you upload to your page, so that they show up more often in your followers’ news feeds. There are lots of different things you can do to optimise your Facebook page for success, however, unless you have a very small audience and know for sure that none of them check their news feed very often, don’t boost your posts if you have other options available to you.

Why You Shouldn’t Boost Your Facebook Posts

Boosting your posts is an expensive strategy that doesn’t always work as well as you might hope. There are a few reasons why you shouldn’t boost your posts, including:

- You’ll have to pay, which could hurt small businesses who rely on Facebook for a significant part of their marketing budget

- You don’t know who your posts will show up in front of

- You don’t know who you’ll annoy with your posts

- Boosting posts doesn’t actually increase engagement

- You don’t know what kind of posts are best for boosting

How Does Facebook Boosting Work?

Facebook boosting works by increasing the amount of “reach” that your posts achieve. If you don’t pay to boost your posts, Facebook uses a number of algorithms and factors to determine when and where your posts get shown to your followers. When you boost a post, you’re essentially paying to change the algorithms Facebook uses to show your posts. In most cases, you’ll get more views for your posts and in theory that should mean a higher chance of converting those views into leads. Facebook boosting works like this: When you upload a post to Facebook, you’re given the option to “boost” that post. If you select the option to boost, you’ll be given a variety of ways to target your audience and a cost estimate for how much the boost will cost you, however, this isn't as effective as running stand-alone ads to really target your key audience groups.

Why Is Facebook Boosting Bad for Small Businesses?

There are several reasons why boosting your posts could be bad for your small business. In fact, it could actually hurt your business and not help it at all. Boosting your posts will likely attract the wrong kinds of followers and end up wasting a budget that you could've spent elsewhere. By targeting the wrong type of customers you may end up even generating bad customer service experiences whilst not generating the leads you actually want. More importantly, when we live in a content-driven world, boosted posts often appear as low-quality content to the end users' eyes. Thanks to the high cost of boosting posts, Facebook is not a very effective marketing channel for small businesses. While it is great for gathering likes, promoting your posts to your existing followers is a different story. Facebook is a very crowded space with lots of competing posts. It is impossible to target people who aren’t following you just by boosting, which means that the only people who will see your posts are your followers.

Three Ways to Get More Exposure for Your Facebook Posts

Boosting your posts is not the only way to get more eyes on your Facebook posts. In fact, there are several other methods you can use to get more views and leads from Facebook. The best way to promote your Facebook posts is to ensure that you’re posting regularly and at the right times. If you post regularly, your followers will expect it, and they’ll come to check out your page more often. If you post at the right times, you’ll have a much better chance of capturing the attention of your followers. After all, nobody will see your posts if they’re not there to see them. Ensure that when you post at the right times you're always posting the right kinds of content for your audience, this is the best way to get more views and engagements for your posts.

Bottom line

Facebook boosting is an expensive strategy that is intended for large brands who want quick attention to their posts. Boosting your posts should be a last resort if your business is struggling. When you boost your posts, you’re paying to reach people who don’t know who you are. Boosting your posts is a bad idea for small businesses because it is expensive and doesn’t always get you the results you’re hoping for. Focus on posting regularly and at the right times, and make sure you’re posting the right kinds of content so that you can generate more views for your posts naturally. When you're ready to consider putting a budget behind a Facebook strategy you should be looking to take advantage of the targeting and tracking options of Facebook Ads Manager.