Too many business owners are still throwing advertising dollars into the raging dumpster fire of modern social media and getting nothing in return.
Why?
Because, in addition to being a poison, platforms like Facebook and TikTok still own the largest audience in the world and so they remain a necessary evil for many business owners searching for their next customer or client.
As a result, at one point or another, most business owners will…
Create a Facebook Business Page or an Instagram Business Account or Meta Business Portfolio (or whatever they’re calling them now),
Make a social media post promoting their business, their service, their product, etc.,
Then, when the social media app presents them with the opportunity to “boost” their post with the promise of reaching hundreds of social media users,
The business owner gets lured in by the (obviously) too-good-to-be-true offer and ends up giving Facebook or Instagram a few hundred bucks.
That is a trap.
There’s a reason why social media apps are so aggressive with how often they push the “boost this post” offer on business owners.
“This post is doing better than 95% of recent posts. Promote it to reach a wider audience.” sounds promising but it’s selling snake oil.
⚠️ What Are You Paying For?
Let’s be perfectly clear about one thing:
Whether it’s TikTok or Instagram or LinkedIn or any of social media platform, every single time that you give money to a social media platform, you (intentionally or accidentally) pay for one very specific goal.
Every time.
One goal.
Not multiple; just one.
Marketing nerds will call it “single metric optimization.”
That one singular goal might be:
More views on a video,
More subscribers for your email marketing list,
More website visitors,
More fans and followers,
More leads in your sales funnel, and more.
Arguably, all of these things (video views, leads, website visitors, subscribers, etc.) are mission-critical parts of a holistic digital business strategy and you probably should be paying for them.
Unfortunately, when you click “boost,” those legitimately valuable results aren’t selected by default.
Instead, when you click “boost”, the default goal and result is automatically set to generating as many cheap impressions, clicks, or likes as possible.
Cheap Eyeballs.
By default, when you click “boost” on a social media post, you don’t pay for leads or video views or website traffic or any of the worthwhile “hard” metrics.
By default, when you click “boost” on a social media post, the social media platform optimizes the distribution of that post to get as many impressions or clicks or likes as possible.
“Clicks” go nowhere.
“Likes” don’t pay the bills.
And “impressions” are effectively worthless. Facebook defines impressions as: “The number of times your ads were on screen.”
That’s all. You’re paying for a split-second cameo appearance in the corner of a stranger’s hundred-miles-per-hour doomscroll.
So for a few hundred bucks, business owners “boost” their social media post, the post spends 0.5 seconds on two thousand people’s screens, and the business gets a few clicks and likes. Neat.
There’s A Better Way.
Hitting “boost” is a waste of money but it isn’t the only option.
These social media apps actually do offer good results (huge, successful brands would have left social media if it didn’t work) but Facebook and TikTok and LinkedIn and Instagram gatekeep the necessary functionality by hiding it in their Ads Manager platforms.
The next time you want a promotion or an announcement or a call-to-action to perform well online, I want you to avoid the “boost” button like the plague and instead go to the app’s Ads Manager to intentionally and specifically hand-pick the result that you want to pay for.
Strong-arm Instagram into giving you new email subscribers instead of just reach.
Force Facebook to deliver ads that make online sales, not farm for “likes”.
Make these apps give you what you actually want and start seeing real results, like…
Instead of just “boosting” posts for likes and impressions, Air Riderz Trampoline Park got 300 actual purchases of their birthday party package deals for an average of just $14 per booking by exclusively optimizing their ads for purchases.
Instead of just “boosting” posts to reach hundreds of disinterested eyeballs, The Kin Studio in Toronto ran ads built for lead capture that actually scheduled 64 people into their first appointment at an average cost of less than $22 per new lead.
Clicks and likes won’t keep the lights on so stop hitting the “boost” button and start forcing these social media apps to actually deliver customers and clients.
