If you’ve ever asked this question, we’ve got the answer for you. The short answer is simply ‘yes, of course’. If such a blanket statement makes you suspicious, there is also the long answer and some exceptions to the rule.
Let’s start with the exceptions.
- You run a joke and/or meme page. If your jokes are good, you already have a great reach through post shares. If your jokes are not that great, no amount of advertising will help. Sorry.
- You don’t care if anyone sees your posts. This is weird, but some people are strange and got their own thing going, we’re not here to judge.
You may be saying “but hey, I got a lot of followers and reach my clients without paid ads”, but this is rarely the case. Facebook algorithm seems to favor small new pages and your post reach initially may be even greater than the page follower or fan count, but this effect soon wears off. Plus – you got to ask yourself if they are really your potential clients at all. For most new businesses the first couple of hundreds of followers tend to be family, friends and acquaintances. It’s nice to have them, but they are not likely to be the ones who buy your product or service.
For older pages with a bigger following the story is a little different. In the good old days, facebook showed your posts to all your followers, but that is no longer the case. Unless the content is especially engaging (like the meme pages mentioned above), only a fraction of your followers will ever see what you post – usually 10% or less. And that 10% or less might not even be your potential clients – they might have followed because of a contest you did or more likely they might be your friends who like your posts because they like you. And even more likely – they might be engaging with your page because they’re already your clients and you don’t really need to woo them anymore.
Considering all this it follows that if you’re not promoting or boosting your posts, you’re wasting your time and money on something your actual target audience will never see. In the classic advertising world there is a 20-80 rule that says that 20% of your budget should be spent on the creative materials like video, audio or images, and 80% on the media – tv or radio time or space in a newspaper or magazine so that people see your advertisement. The same is true for facebook posts because they too are really just ads for your business, and if you’re spending money (or your own time, which is mostly the same), you should make sure it’s not wasted and people see what you’ve posted. Besides, facebook ads help you with targeting and making sure it’s the right kind of people, the people you need and the people who need your business. Furthermore – if you use AdYeet, it only requires you to set up once and all your posts you ever publish will be promoted.
*in this context we’ve used the terms boost and promote interchangeably, as a lot of people do. In reality boosting is and inferior kind of promoting, using a facebook tool that offers less targeting options.
