Pros and Cons of Paying for Exposure on Facebook
Let’s face it, growing an audience and upping engagement on social media is tough work—especially so on Facebook. We’ve all seen the passion-filled rants and widely shared posts on the importance of organically growing your audience and staying far away from the thieves attempting to sell followers for your account.
We agree. Organic engagement is wildly important and should be one of your top social media marketing goals. The problem is, with a steadily growing population on social media (e.g. Facebook’s 18 million business pages) and the mass amount of content floating around every platform, it’s becoming more and more challenging for a page or post to achieve organic visibility.
For obvious reasons, many platforms have implemented a pay-for-boost system. With a small budget, and engaging, high-quality content, it can be beneficial to pay to “boost” your post and still grow your audience organically.
So, what exactly is paid social media boosting?
If you have a Facebook page set up for your website, brand or business, you most likely post content for your audience to see. Because of Facebook’s content limitations, only a portion of your current audience—those who have liked your page—will set eyes on your latest status update, image, or announcement. Thus, your organic exposure for your Facebook posts is unpredictable.
With paid social media boosting, you can gain more visibility to your current fan base, expand to friends of your fans, or specify an audience of your choice through targeting. In fact, Facebook has one of the most robust platforms for reaching a specific audience, from uploading a mailing list to create a custom audience to targeting specific demographics. This can be a great way to gain exposure with exactly who you want to reach.
Of course, however, this comes at a price. Don’t shy away quite yet. The fee is dependent on the reach you are looking for, but if you’re just starting out, a small budget can help you reap great value out of securing more eyes on your content.
Quick Pros and Cons of Paid Social Media Boosting
Pros:
- It’s fast and easy to boost and target the audience to which you’re marketing.
- You’re still getting organic engagement, you’re just making it possible for your target audience to see your stuff.
- It’s a great “baby step” for your content marketing. Use a small, fixed budget you’re comfortable with and view it as practice. This will make Facebook advertising or PPC a little less overwhelming.
- It will make it easier to determine what content resonates with your readers. Likes and shares will be a big indicator in this regard.
Cons:
- Creating quality content is still necessary to see any value from boosting your posts. Know your audience and know what they like before you spend money to put “just anything” out there.
- Your boosted posts may overshadow the organic reach that your non-boosted posts achieve throughout the week.
- Facebook generally doesn’t approve of boosting a post if it contains an image that has words making up more than 20% of it (think infographics or marketing materials).
- Once you start paying for boosted posts, you will have to keep forking over the dough to maintain the right interaction. When you stop paying to boost posts, a lot of the organic engagement will go away.
Final Thoughts
It “pays” to build engagement organically, but a little boost every now and then can help if you’re targeting the right audience. Start small, set a budget and boost your posts accordingly.