Boosted Posts vs. Paid Ads: What’s the Difference?

By now, you know that Facebook ads should be a core focus of your marketing plan. If you don’t, well… we need to talk. After all, over 1.4 billion people are using Facebook every day, 13.8 times per day. Why wouldn’t you capitalise on that reach?

“But I already boost my Facebook posts — that’s the same thing, right?”

No, friends. It most definitely is not. This common misconception has spread like wildfire throughout small businesses — but it ends here.

So, what’s the difference?

You’ve probably seen a notification encouraging you to “boost your post”. This happens when:

• your post is performing well, or
• Facebook’s algorithms have found it similar to other Boosted Posts.

You may be inclined to take Facebook’s advice — they’re the experts, right? But it’s not always as effective as they’d like you to think.

A Boosted Post is the most basic advertising you can do on Facebook. Essentially, you pay to have one of your published posts appear in more people’s news feeds. There’s limited audience targeting, and far less creative control — which is all well and good when you’re after likes, shares, and comments.

A Paid Ad, on the other hand, is designed not just to be seen — but to drive an action. In your case, that action is clicking through to your website and enquiring about either a listing, or your services. They do this by providing a call to action and linking out to your website, an external site (such as a listing on a portal), or a contact form. Whatever works for you!

Hopefully, by now you know we help real estate agents with the latter. In fact, one Spoke user has just achieved 1,072 ad clicks in one week. That’s 1,072 clicks to view detailed property information — all for $150.

So, how can you tell the difference?

Anatomy of a Boosted Post

Basically, a Boosted Post takes a post that’s already on your page and boosts it to a wider audience.

You’ve probably seen them in your news feed before. They look like this.

Boosted Posts are great for gaining post engagement — but considerably less useful for turning your audience into leads.

For a start, Boosted Posts only give you a few targeting options: people who have liked your page, friends of people who have liked your page, and people who you choose through a few basic targeting options. This can limit the effectiveness of your ad, as you’re not reaching the most interested audience.

Secondly, Boosted Posts are designed to generate likes and comments — not driving action (eg. a click through to your website. So, while boosting can sometimes be useful for blog posts (where you’re aiming to get more eyes on your brand) it’s not as useful for advertising current listings or offering appraisals.

Plus, Boosted Posts can only be advertised for 1–7 days — which means the people who you want to see your posts might miss them, if they’re not active at that time. They’re also less likely to see your brand multiple times. This can be a problem, as you need multiple touch points to make an impact. More on this later.

One thing Boosted Posts are useful for is generating social proof. When users come to your Facebook page, they’ll be more likely to engage through likes, comments and shares if they see that other people are too.

So, if you do take Facebook up on its offer of boosting your post, make sure the content you’re sharing is insightful, helpful and unique. Read Siteloft’s quick guide on content creation vs. content curation for some ideas.

Anatomy of a Paid Ad

Paid Ads are a little bit different. And when we say ‘different’ in this context, we mean better.

Instead of solely working to increase engagement, like Boosted Posts, you can pick a marketing objective: awareness, reach, traffic, conversions… the list goes on. Basically, this is the action you want people to take after seeing your ad. Facebook will show your ads to a slightly different audience, depending on your objective — but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Paid Ads include a:

• headline
• call to action
• description
• image

and look a little something like this:

You can even decide where they are displayed, whether it be suggested videos on Facebook or Instagram stories — it’s completely customisable.

Targeting

The targeting options for Paid Ads are so advanced that you can showcase a property to up to 79% of the population of a suburb.

Of course, you could target people based on their job title, education level, household income, etc — but you can get creative.

Facebook’s got a few different ways that you can target:

• Based on location
  This way, you can advertise properties strictly to the people around your chosen area. You’ll avoid an influx of people from Tasmania wondering why they’re being shown a property in Perth.
• Based on demographics
  You can select an audience based on gender, age, education, relationship status, job and plenty more. This way you can market each property to the demographic that it best suits. For example, target a luxury home to people with incomes to suit, and first homes to newlyweds.
• Based on behaviour
  Target people based on their purchase behaviour and activities. The list of behaviours you can target is almost endless. If you’re sharing a blog targeted to a particular audience, now’s your chance to get it to them.
• Based on interests
  Facebook collects data on users’ interests and pops them into neat little categories. There’s even a pre made ‘buying a house’ category. You can also target based to the real estate investors category, or people who are actively browsing realestate.com.
• Based on connections
  You can target people who have already liked your page, or expressed interest. Or, you can exclude them to find new audiences. If someone’s already expressed interest in you (through liking your page), you’re a step ahead. So make the most of it!

For example, you could target someone who has recently gotten married and has a combined income of over $120k/year. This demographic will likely be searching for a home sometime soon, or upsizing to make room for a new family member. You’ll be hitting them at exactly the right time.

The options are endless.

Overwhelmed? Don’t be — we’ve done all the hard work for you. Spoke’s audience categories (first home buyers, active buyers, investors, luxury buyers, your website visitors, and more) are built using data collected from Google and Facebook. So instead of targeting your luxury listing ads to people who:

• use their credit card weekly;
• search for luxury cars; and
• have an impressive job title

you can just tick the Luxury Buyers box!

Where ads appear

Paid Ads never appear on your Business Page. Instead, they show up in your audience’s news feed.

You can choose whether they’re displayed on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger or Audience Network. This means that you’re able to grow your reach with precision. It also means that you can create a multi-touch point plan.

Science tells us it takes 6–8 ‘touches’ (a.k.a interactions with your brand) before a seller will commit to using your agency — so make sure you’re catching them on every platform.

Timing

Unlike Boosted Posts, you can decide what time your Paid Ads are shown — meaning you’re not wasting ad spend while your target audience is counting sheep.

For example, if you’re advertising an apartment close to the CBD, you could advertise from 5–7pm as this is when a 9–5 city worker will mostly likely be scrolling through Facebook on their commute home.

So, should you ever bother boosting a post?

There is the one reason why you may want to continue boosting posts. You’re able to retarget ads to Facebook users who have interacted with your Facebook page.

Facebook has remarkable retargeting abilities. Once someone has shown interest in your Paid Ad, you can keep showing them more, different ads for the same thing. Pretty cool, right? You can read more about retargeting here.

You could boost a blog post detailing staging tips for selling a home. Then, you can show them ads for your agency — linking out to your contact form.

But here’s the thing: the process of coming up with ads, having them designed, targeting them to exactly the right audience and uploading them to various networks can be a time consuming and tedious process.

So, you take care of the boosting — and let Spoke do the rest. Spoke works around the clock to do all of the work for you. That’s what it’s there for, after all.