If you're boosting your ads on Facebook, you may be doing it wrong.

Do you advertise on Facebook and Instagram? If you’ve got a product or service with a specific audience, you probably should. However, it’s one of the trickiest aspects of digital marketing to master, not least because there’s so much to choose from.

Every business should have a presence on Facebook and Instagram through a dedicated business page. It’s an opportunity to interact with your customers, add some fresh content to your website through integrations and demonstrate that you’re on top of the latest happenings in the industry.

You might have noticed as soon as you started posting on either platform somewhat regularly, the freebies soon started mounting up. “Here’s $5 to boost your post – you’ll reach another thousand people with it,” they say.

Boosting posts isn’t wholly ineffective, but it might not be the best use of your time or marketing budget. There’s more nuance to Facebook advertising than many entrepreneurs, and even content marketing teams realise, and we’d like to take this opportunity to share a better approach.

Why Boosted Posts Might Not Be for You

Many digital marketing professionals will admit that their first experience of Facebook paid ads and their Instagram equivalent involved boosted posts. The respective platforms make it so easy to drop a few dollars for greater visibility that it’s easy to excuse. However, boosted posts don’t take full advantage of the advertising ecosystem on either platform.

There’s No Split Testing on Boosted Posts

Creating and launching ads isn’t the most time-consuming part of digital marketing. It’s tracking and refining until you achieve perfection that really keeps professionals up at night. Split testing is widely acknowledged as being the best way to make incremental improvements based on actual results, but that simply isn’t happening with boosted posts.

There are More Powerful Targeting Options Elsewhere

Facebook and its subsidiary, Instagram, rely on advertising to turn a profit. That can’t be understated – in 2020, around 97.9% of the company’s income came from advertising. They have every reason to make your ads as successful as possible but boosted posts won’t always get you there.

Ads targeted at the wrong audience won’t necessarily reduce clicks, but they’ll result in wasted budget. You have three options for a boosted post:

• People who already like your page
• Friends of people that like your page
• Targeted users

The first two sound like a waste of time, but the third option is somewhat interesting. Unfortunately, while it’s possible to target a cross-section of Facebook’s audience, it’s so limited compared to the Facebook Power Editor for advertisers that it might leave you scratching your head.

Promoted Posts Just Aren’t That Important in the Marketing Funnel

We have nothing against posting regularly on Facebook and Instagram. You’ve got an audience, and they’ve demonstrated an interest in what you’re selling. So, by all means, keep them up to date and engage them. However, your posts probably aren’t direct ads. They’re designed to engage an existing audience, not to acquire a new one.

Do all you can to get your name out there, but don’t lose sight of the importance of good old-fashioned selling to people that might never have even heard of you before.

Dark posts may sound ominous, but they’re potentially the best way for any online business to hit their KPIs and reach their target audience across two of the world’s most popular social media platforms.

Conventional boosted posts can work because they demonstrate engagement. If you post something and it does well with your current audience, it makes sense to throw a few dollars at it to showcase it to more people. However, your options are relatively limited. As the post already exists, there’s no opportunity for multivariate testing or A/B testing. The post is what it is, and whether you boost it or not is solely down to you.

Dark posts are essentially the hybrid between boosted posts and conventional paid ads that digital marketing teams have waited for. Of course, they’re not as dark as the name would suggest either – anyone can visit the Page Transparency area of your page to see what you’re promoting.

Crucially, they appear to users like any other boosted post and land in their feeds if they meet the segmentation criteria specified when promoting a post. However, that doesn’t mean they have to show up on your main feed.

Instead, they’re designed like any other paid ad, but in the standard post format. Text, images, links and audience selection can all change between dark posts. They’re entirely separate from your main feed and are great for reaching potential customers that don’t follow you yet but fall firmly into one of your audience profiles.