You’ve probably noticed on your practice’s Facebook page that you have the ability to boost your post, meaning that you pay a small amount of money to get a single post seen by a wider audience. You may even get messages from Facebook telling you how many more people will see your post if you do boost it. While boosting here and there isn’t going to hurt you, we don’t want you to confuse it with actually running a Facebook ad. It’s almost like comparing apples and oranges. In fact, dentist’s sometimes tell us that Facebook ads haven’t worked for them, when all they had been doing was boosting posts. Here is an explanation of the limitations of a “boost” in contrast to the capabilities of Facebook’s robust ad platform.
To start, the boost button helps get a single post seen by a bigger audience, while a Facebook ad involves a more thought out campaign. If you want to grow your brand and grow your audience, Facebook ads allows you to do this with its highly advanced targeting tools. Ads manager, the admin dashboard where you create Facebook ads, allows you to select certain criteria based on the type of audience you want to reach. Whether it’s by geography or personal interests, you choose who sees your ad and who doesn’t.
Boosting doesn’t give you the results you need to know if a particular post resonated with your audience or not. With Ads manager, you are able to run multiple ads at once,called A/B split testing, and then put money towards the one ad that is running successfully. This allows you optimize your budget, paying only for the ad that resonates with your target audience.
What’s more, you can better track what action your audience takes based on your Facebook ad, such as if they liked your Facebook page, booked an appointment with you, or went to your landing page. Tracking what works with your ads helps you to create better ads and optimize your ad budget.
While boosting is a great way to start off with Facebook advertising, you may eventually find yourself wanting more control over your ads. It’s a natural progression once you see the power that Facebook ads can provide for your practice.
