Differences between Facebook News Feed ads and boosted Facebook posts to help you determine which is best for meeting your marketing goals.
Facebook News Feed Ads
Facebook News Feed ads allow you to run a targeted campaign to meet a specific goal with ads that show up in the desktop and/or mobile News Feed of targeted users, depending on your goals. Goals can include:
- Page Post Engagement
- Page Likes
- Website Clicks
- Website Conversions
- App Installs
- Event Responses
- Video Views
- And More
Once you choose your goal, you can begin setting up your campaign, which includes selecting advanced targeting options like age, gender, hobbies, location, and more. After determining your audience, you add your budget, creative (the image or video you want people to see), and messaging. With certain campaign types, you can entice users to take action directly from your ad by including a call to action button. Depending on your goals, there are different call to action buttons to choose from, like Get Directions, Book Now, and more.
Facebook News Feed ads can take on many formats depending on the goal and campaign type, but they have in common the fact that these ads show up in the Facebook News Feed and are identified as sponsored content.
Boosted Facebook Posts
Boosted Facebook posts are a type of Facebook News Feed ad that takes content in the form of a Facebook page post and amplifies it to a specific audience via Facebook’s News Feed advertising platform in order to target or increase visibility and boost post engagement.
Facebook gives you the option to boost status updates, photos, videos, and offers from your business page, so they will appear higher in the News Feed of your target audience, which helps more people see your post until your budget runs out. Boosted posts appear as “Sponsored” posts in the News Feed and can appear on Instagram.
Many Facebook page owners are familiar with this type of advertising because they are often prompted to boost well-performing content by Facebook while they are logged in as a user. You can select to boost a post directly from your page on posts that have the blue “Boost” button, and you can also select to boost a post from Facebook’s Ad Manager, which offers some deeper targeting and campaign capabilities.