Your business has a social media account that is set up with the purpose to promote your brand and your products. Your monthly marketing budget allows you to spend a set amount on your social media ad campaign, but you’ve recently discovered boosted posts, and you wonder which is better.
You are a regular on this specific social media platform and you’ve seen several boosted posts pop up on your feed. Your first impression is that boosted posts can reach an audience that might not be reached with your standard ad campaign. However, your social media campaign lends itself to a variety of detailed customisation options to ensure that you can target users that fall under your target audience and demographic.
For you to make an informed decision, you must look at the finer details for both paid ad campaigns on social media platforms and boosted posts. Let’s have a closer look at these two.
Paid Social Media Ad Campaigns
- Utilising an Ad Management Tool: These campaigns are set up and managed via a dedicated ad management tool. This tool delivers a comprehensive method of control over your ads. You can target specific users and audiences on the platform. You can also set up campaign goals and targets, view ad performance via a dedicated analytics tool, and use multimedia content for your ads.
- Optimising Your Ad Campaign: Furthermore, with the help of the analytics tool, you can optimise your ad campaign for optimal ROI and to reach your specific campaign goals and targets. This is a crucial factor for businesses, as you will always have targets to reach and reasons to run a social media ad campaign for your brand.
Boosted Posts
- Utilising Organic Posts: Your business’s social media account needs to regularly post organic content – not only to show that the account is active, but also to interact with your followers. Boosted posts utilise an organic post that gets promoted to a larger audience of users that might not have otherwise seen the content.
- Limited Control: In direct comparison to a social media ad campaign, a boosted post offers limited control over target audiences and ad placement. Although it offers a simplified approach to paid ads on social media platforms, it is not nearly as wholistic as a standard ad campaign. However, you can still set basic goals, a budget, and the duration over which you want your post to be boosted.
A Basic Comparison
- Brand Awareness: Both paid social ads and boosted posts can assist with brand awareness via social media marketing. However, boosted posts can reach a wider audience.
- Conversions: In the end, you want your social media marketing campaigns to generate conversions for your business. Boosted posts are not designed for conversions, whereas ad campaigns can drive conversions with precise targeting methods.
- Engagement: Ad campaigns are excellent for user engagement – with content that is specifically tailored to a target audience. Boosted posts are ideal to increase post interaction for the specific post that is being boosted.
- Increasing User Traffic: Boosted posts are more effective in increasing user traffic to your business’s social media account/profile. It might pique the interest of users and get them to follow the account that posted the specific post. Ad campaigns put the focus on generating conversions as opposed to generating followers for your account.
Now that you understand the difference between a social media ad campaign and a boosted post, you can make an informed decision on where you want to spend your marketing budget on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.
