We’re back with our weekly Top Tip Tuesday and this week we’re helping uncover the brutal truth behind an all too common feature within Facebook and how they post your ads.

Let’s start with the good news! There are other ways to get your posts in front of people on Facebook other than just organic posts!

Bad news is that the vast majority of businesses are falling into an all too common trap.

One way to get your posts in front of people is to BOOST them.

That’s when you click the good ol’ boost button, pay Facebook some money and they’ll show your post to more people.

Sounds good right? A good use of a few quid?

NOooooooOOOOooooo!

The Boost button is the biggest trap for business owners on Facebook.

Why?

Well here’s the thing - Facebook is actually very smart. 

It knows who's most likely to click on your ad, to like your ad, to share it, even to BUY from it. 

And if you tell it what you want, it'll OPTIMISE your ads to show them to the people you want. 

Now for most of us, that would be people who are most likely to BUY or at least become a LEAD. 

But here's the issue... 

...when you click BOOST what you're telling Facebook is to show your ad to the people who are most likely to ENGAGE with your ad - in other words, people who will LIKE, COMMENT and SHARE. 

SPOILER ALERT: you can't pay the bills with Facebook Likes 

The Boost button has one job, to get you the most engagement on your 'ad' so you feel like it's worked. 

What you want to do is NOT click Boost - but instead, build a 'proper' ad using the Facebook Ads Manager.

It's still simple to do (once you know how) and will make your ads waaaaay more successful.

And if you’ve never looked at Ads manager or only had a little dabble, here’s a quick overview.

Ads Manager is Facebook's starting point for running ads on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger or Audience Network. It's an all-in-one tool for creating ads, managing when and where they'll run and tracking how well your campaigns are performing.

Ads Manager is a powerful ad management tool, and the good news is that it's designed for advertisers of any experience level to be able to target the right type of people that will be most likely to buy from and a lot more effectively than the “boost” feature will do.

www.facebook.com/business/tools/ads-manager