Instagram today is used by well over 1 billion people worldwide every month and has a total global membership that surpasses a billion users as well. With numbers like these, the social media giant, a branch of the Facebook monster is an ideal landscape for engaging with your fans in almost any niche or brand space.
Two of the most notable and immediately accessible ways to spread visibility of your Instagram presence on the photo/video sharing platform are post boosting and Instagram advertising. In case you didn’t know, they’re quite different from each other in certain ways even though you have to pay for both.
Today we’re going to look at the post boosting route and explain some of its pros and cons, and then decide if it’s even worth trying.
The Difference between Boosting a Post vs. Instagram Ads
If you’ve used Instagram for any length of time you’ve almost certainly been presented with pushy little announcements from the website saying the following: “This post is doing better than 95% of recent posts. Promote it to reach a wider audience.”
This is the text with which Instagram offers you the option of boosting your post’s reach to a wider and more custom-selected audience. You can apply a boost to any of your posts whenever you like, but it comes with a price.
The difference between this and an actual ad campaign is mainly in the simplicity of one vs. the other. With post boosting, you’re instantly increasing display inside Instagram of a specific organic post you’ve made with only limited customization options.
With Instagram ads on the other hand, you enter the Facebook ads manager and use it to form multiple targeted ad campaign variants with specific long-term budgets. You can adjust these precisely again and again for different audiences based on numerous calibration and targeting options.
The Pros of Boosting your IG Posts
For simple, immediate attempts to get more traction for your Instagram content, boosted posts are the quickest and easiest way to go. You can boost any of your posts at any time right away without all the hassle and complexities of going into the Facebook Ads Manager and creating an ad campaign. This is in fact the single biggest pro of post boosting, it’s sheer rapid simplicity.
When you boost your post, the Instagram platform offers a chance to quickly add in a call-to-action for viewers to learn more, shop your main page or contact you. This also makes it an ideal tool for very easily and quickly offering additional options to your audience.
Besides the above, boosted posts also let you optimize for a number of specific goals such as click-through to external website links, increasing likes, comments or clicks and shares, and getting audiences to message you for inquiries.
Additionally, boosted posts can be adjusted to reach either more of your existing audience or entirely new audiences based on many of the same interest or other categories that exist in Ads Manager. However, audience selection options are much more limited than in Ads Manager.
Finally, boosting posts can be paid for with a simple budget/timeframe process that’s very easy to set up and automate right away.
The Cons of Boosting your IG Posts
The biggest limitation of post boosting is its simplicity. In certain contexts, this is a major benefit of this promotion tool but in others it can be pointless. If you want to do some heavy duty Instagram advertising for your serious business or promote to multiple audiences for different content and product types, boosted posts are very limited in scope.
Another major con of post boosting is that the original post itself can’t be changed. Yes, you can add in a little call-to-action (CTA) and specify what it is, but that’s about it. The content of the post can’t be tweaked and modified the way Facebook/Instagram ad content can be for multiple campaign variations.
Furthermore, when it comes to specific placement of boosted posts, your options are extremely limited. For one thing, you can only select one kind of audience at a time and secondly, Facebook reserves the right to automate much of the specific placement details. Ad campaigns give you many more options of your own here.
Finally, your price budget for post boosts can’t be adjusted much to speed up placement or for setting precise cost controls on cost per click or maximum CPM.
Is Post Boosting Worth It?
The bottom line about boosting posts for higher Instagram engagement is that they’re a specific tool for a specific need. For simple, rapid promotion of straightforward Instagram pages, they can be useful and cheap sources of higher engagement, but if you want to create serious ad campaigns for complex brand pages, using ad campaigns is probably a better option.
For this though, you’ll have to invest time and effort in your campaigns for quality results. Asking for expert advertising assistance from the social media marketing professionals at Bastion Elevate can help you speed this process up enormously and simply. Contact us today!
