The “Boost post” button is the most successful sales element Meta has ever built. It is blue, it is big, it sits right under your post and it promises reach for the price of a pizza. Pressing it is satisfying. Which is why an enormous number of small businesses press it, and why an enormous number of them believe they have tried advertising.
They haven’t. They have tried something else, related to advertising roughly the way driving around a car park is related to driving on a motorway.
What the button actually does
When you boost a post, you are telling Meta: take this post and show it to more people. The goal it pursues by default is most often engagement — likes, comments, views. And the system is exceptionally good at that. Ask it for likes and you will get likes.
The problem is that likes aren’t orders. The system will go looking for people who enjoy tapping a heart, not people who enjoy buying. Those are two different groups, and in the second one people comment rarely.
On top of that, boosting a post leaves you with almost nothing in your hands: no serious targeting options, no separate testing of two versions, no limit on how often the same person may see the same ad, and no clean connection between the ad and what happened afterwards.
What Ads Manager gives you
In Ads Manager the first question isn’t “who” but “what should happen”. And that question changes everything. Choose the objective “leads” or “purchases” and the system goes looking for people who, after clicking, tend to submit or buy something — not people who like to comment.
A few more things follow that the button doesn’t have:
- Audiences that mean something. Not just age and location, but people who have been on your site, who viewed a particular product, who messaged you — and “lookalike audiences” built from the pattern of your existing customers.
- Retargeting. The most profitable ad you have: showing something to a person who was in your basket and left.
- Testing two versions at once. Two photographs, the same budget, one week. After a week you know rather than guess.
- Frequency control. Important in a small market — with a small audience, the same person sees your ad five times quickly and stops noticing it.
- Separate ads for Facebook and Instagram. What works in one often doesn’t in the other.
When the button is perfectly fine
Let’s not overstate it — boosting a post has its place. It is useful when:
- you have an event or an announcement you want to tell your local area about: new opening hours, a fair, a tasting, an open day;
- you have a post that did unexpectedly well organically and you want to give it a little push — that is a sign the content genuinely interests people;
- it is about local recognition and you don’t need to measure orders, because you record them in the shop or over the phone.
What boosting a post will not produce is a steady flow of enquiries. It isn’t built for that.
Why the feeling and the result differ so much
A boosted post feels unusually pleasant: the numbers rise, notifications arrive, acquaintances message to say they saw you. All of it is visible and immediate.
A real campaign feels like tedium: the interface has columns of cost per result that have to be read. Acquaintances don’t message to say they saw you, because they didn’t — the people who saw it were the ones who left a product in the basket.
So the first option feels better and the second sells better. That is the whole of it.
If you are moving from the button to a campaign, in this order
- Set up a business account (Meta Business Suite) and an ad account. Have it owned by the company, not by an employee’s personal profile — that becomes important on the day that employee leaves.
- Install tracking on the website and make sure it respects the visitor’s cookie consent; how our own site handles that is set out in the privacy and cookie policy.
- Define what counts as a result. Form submitted, call, purchase. Not a page visit.
- Prepare a landing page that answers the ad. Not the home page.
- Run two ads, not one, and judge them after a week by cost per enquiry.
- Add retargeting as soon as you have enough traffic for it to make sense.
If reading that list makes it feel like a lot of work for something that is one click with the button — that is exactly right. The difference in return is of roughly the same magnitude.
What management with us looks like is on the advertising pricing page; Facebook and Instagram start at 249 €/month, with the ad budget separate. If you feel you have so far received nothing for what you paid, the fastest first step is often a website audit — a written review of where the money is going. Send questions to cont@limonet.com or through the contact form.