Most brands often choose to boost their posts on Facebook ads rather than use Facebook ads and we understand why. It’s simple and efficient, but it’s really not optimal overtime. The possibilities when boosting your Facebook post are extremely small compared to using the Facebook ads manager.
If you want to learn more about the Facebook ads manager, I recommend our article “How to Leverage the Facebook Ads Manager: A Guide for Starters“.
Boosting your Facebook post is really not optimal because you can’t add a call-to-action, optimize your ads, target custom audiences, leverage retargeting audiences, lookalike audiences, budget optimization, and so on. Honestly, the list could go on for this entire article.
Why shouldn’t I boost my Facebook post?
When boosting a Facebook post, you have very little control over the results you obtain. It can easily be compared to throwing money in the air. Yes, you can choose the audience but you won’t be able to generate more than “engagements”. Without leveraging Facebook ads objectives such as clicks or conversions, you will likely end up with $100 spent and only a few likes on your post.
It’s generally not good to only get engagement on Facebook because you can’t generate a return on investment. When it comes to selecting the right objective with Facebook ads, it’s really important to select your end goal. Facebook will show your ad to people who will for instance engage with your ads rather than people who will buy.
At K6, we’ve had the pleasure of trying to experiment with all sorts of objectives and our conclusion is that no matter what your objective is, you should select the one closest to your end goal. Most companies should use the “conversions” objective to generate sales or leads.
Facebook’s machine learning is becoming really good at predicting people’s behaviour. If you are optimizing for “content views”, you’ll probably get a lot of people who like to click on links but not to “purchase”.
Back to our Facebook boost post example, if you aim to get likes and comments, then you will probably get just that. You might get a few link clicks and if you are lucky 1-2 page likes but that’s it. Facebook wants to show your ad to people most likely to engage but not most likely to buy.
Now, we’re not saying you should not boost your Facebook post if you actually aim to generate engagement, but most businesses generally want to use Facebook ads to generate more revenue.
How do I create a Facebook ad from an existing post?
It’s actually quite easy, just follow the steps below to create a Facebook ad from an existing post:
- Make a post on your Facebook page: make sure that you are sure about the image/video because once you post it, you can only change the text above but not the actual creative.
- Log into your Facebook Business Manager: if you haven’t set this up yet, you can take a look at our article “How to Leverage the Facebook Ads Manager: A Guide for Starters“.
- Click on the menu & select Page Post.
- Find the post you want to use in your Facebook ad and you’ll see an ID code that you’ll have to copy. You can also choose to create an ad directly from there.
- With the ID code, you can select use existing post when creating your Facebook ad in the ads manager and enter the post ID.
What’s next?
It’s important to know how to leverage a post you’ve already made with your Facebook ads. It’s really important because social proof, meaning engagement on your Facebook ads, matters way more than you think.
It’s why having this Facebook ad skills in your tool belt is extremely important. It will allow you to leverage your social proof to generate better results in the long run.