If you’re on Facebook, you’ve probably seen this caption more than once: “This post is so great, it’s better than 90% of other posts.” And here, of course, there is an incentive to promote the post — to set up targeted advertising. With this, according to Facebook, we will reach a huge number of people, and it will definitely pay off.

Unfortunately, we have to disappoint you – it is a fake. These are psychological tricks. It’s like booking when we see the last available room ?

Hungary’s competition authority GVH fined Booking.com $32.17 million for unfair commercial practices, including misleading advertising and psychological pressure on customers.

Instead of promoting posts, it is better to use the well-known Facebook advertising platform. There are many other options and this will help you to better tailor your ads. Imagine you are an archer with only a few arrows. It is better to use them accurately and hit the target than to shoot blindly.

Here are some of the main problems with typical post promotion:

• Automatic placement – Facebook decides where to show ads. The entire Facebook ecosystem consists of many additional platforms such as Tinder. Advertisements displayed elsewhere should be bolded, as the performance is much lower there. Part of your budget is redirected there. This creates a lot of “accidental” clicks. The best performance is on the Facebook and Instagram dashboard itself.
• Devices— most often such a post will be promoted on phones. The disproportion reaches 90%. It’s not bad if it’s a regular post. Worse if you want to redirect the user to a website that also doesn’t work properly on mobile phones (you know how you do). Not everyone has a website ready for the new era.
• Location– by default, this ad is shown to everyone in the specified location. This means that we catch people who live, for example, in Lviv, as well as people who pass by. So if we advertise an event, passers-by will not be interested in such a post.
• Tests— unlike the appearance, the setting does not significantly affect the cost of advertising. The key elements are how the ad creation looks and how well the text is written. In the post promotion option, we cannot verify other images, photos or content. Every so often another photo can get 5 times more clicks. Such things can be verified in the advertising ecosystem.

Extended advertising campaigns are the most effective. This is an advertisement that deliberately directs the recipient to a certain subpage of the website. There, the user can perform a certain action — fill out a form, sign up for a course, study, or simply make a purchase.