For the past five years, Facebook has been trying to master the art of social media advertising. They have had their share of ups and quite a few downs when it comes to success, but one of their biggest businesses successes is actually one of their biggest failures: push button advertising.
Page owners on Facebook can have advertising up and running very quickly. With a credit card on file, they can click two or buttons and have dramatically more exposure brought to posts and pages. The easiest ways to do this come in the form of two buttons, “Boost” and “Promote this Page”. Unfortunately, both buttons are traps. They do nothing to bring the true essence of successful social media advertising to the table, particularly for local business like car dealers.
Boosting a post allows the user to select an amount starting at $5 and going up (way up if you have a ton of fans) from there. It’s quick, simple, and has a handful of options in the ad module. It’s also a way to do more harm than good to your page from an algorithm perspective. Through boosting, page admins are basically saying, “give me more views on this post to people that follow this page and their friends”. While this sounds like a good idea, it’s far from the efficiency associated with building proper post promotional ads through Power Editor.
The Promote this Page button isn’t much better. While you have more options and control over the audience you’re going after, it uses the defaults associated with your page. In other words, the ability to craft the right messages with the right images and going after the right people is minimal. It’s better than nothing and doesn’t have the algorithmic-negatives associated with boosted posts, but it’s still far from as powerful as a similar ad created in Power Editor.
Don’t fall into the trap of push-button Facebook ads. It has been a success for the company and has increased revenue dramatically, so this isn’t intended to curse them. They did the best they could to fulfill revenue needs while still bringing value to the advertising itself, but it also takes away from the true power of Facebook advertising when it’s handled with a little more attention. The bad news is that this type of attention takes more time and experience. The good news is that it’s not hard and the benefits are tremendous.
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