Boosted posts may not be the best boost for your listings

There is a big difference between boosting a Facebook post and creating Facebook ads.

‘Boost’ is the name given to the button that appears on a Facebook post, which allows you to turn your post into a sponsored ad. It enables you to bust out beyond your page and get your brand in front of more users across Facebook and Instagram.

In fact, ‘to boost’ or ‘boosting’ have become the catchall terms for spending advertising dollars on social media. Facebook wants to make social media advertising accessible to every size business, in the world and the boost button is a great starting point for these three reasons:

1. It’s easily accessible – it sits on a post, within your Facebook page.
2. It’s quick to learn – it has a limited number of options from which to choose.
3. It’s fast to complete – you can just set and forget your paid Facebook ad.

But if you’re boosting posts to promote your property listings, it is likely you’re wasting your vendors’ money, and your time.

THE MAIN DISADVANTAGES TO THE FACEBOOK BOOST BUTTON

1. You don’t have options to set a daily budget, which can improve your Facebook ad results dramatically. You can only spread your budget over the time period you set, and Facebook decides how fast or slow you spend your ad dollars.
2. There is no way of tagging users who engage with a boosted post. So the next time you boost a post, it is like throwing the ad out to the same audience again and waiting to see what sticks (also known as the ‘spray and pray’ approach) which means you could be spending a lot more than you need to on audiences that don’t convert.
3. You have limited targeting options. With boosted posts, you are limited to using only one audience at a time. Boosting lets you target by interests, age and gender, whereas with Facebook ads, you can use more advanced tools to combine, include and exclude different audiences.
4. You have less creative control. You can only boost a post after it has been published to your timeline, and once boosted, there is no way of editing the text, image, or video. With Facebook ads, you can design an ad that better fits your goals, whether it’s a carousel ad or customised templates for different placements.
5. There is no easy way to provide vendor reports.
6. Facebook can often decline your ad.

BEYOND THE FACEBOOK BOOST BUTTON

Facebook Ads Manager offers more advanced customisation solutions, and is far more effective in maximising the visibility of your property campaigns. The results of a Facebook ad campaign, done properly, will be far superior to that of a boost. But the key words here are: ‘done properly’. This assumes a couple of things:

1. You have the skills to use Facebook Ads Manager/Business Manager. If you’ve tried it or use it, you’ll know it is not entirely intuitive, and you need to be an advanced Facebook marketer to property manage ads this way. If your targeting is not done right, you can certainly waste your vendors’ money on this approach too.
2. You have the time to manage each ad campaign individually – and done well, it does take time. Based on best practice there are approximately 60 unique steps required to optimise a Facebook campaign. For Facebook ads to be cost-effective, they are not ‘set and forget’ type of advertising. They need constant monitoring and you need to spend time analysing and understanding the results to see what’s worked, and what hasn’t.

This is where Be Seen comes in. Be Seen auto-creates optimised Facebook ads for your property listings and publishes them to potential buyers and sellers (starting point is +5km radius from the property address) to ensure the most cost-effective results.

In doing so, it tags anyone who engages with the property ad, so that they can be retargeted the next time you want to remarket to this same audience. This way, you are not pushing the ad out to all the people who showed no interest previously and thereby significantly reducing your cost per reach results.

It also automatically measures the result of your campaigns, with live data accessible to you and your vendor at any time, and on any device in an easy to read report.

And the best bit… it’s all automated, saving you buckets of time.