Facebook ads: Have you thought about using them? Even if you have a $5 budget to begin with, I encourage you to test them out. Not just because you'll reach more people. A colleague at my co-working space recently reminded me what else you get for your $5: When you buy an ad, you get a TON of information on who responds to your ads. That information may surprise you. Are you reaching people you didn't expect? Not reaching the people you expected to? 

Both of those insights allow you to take action, either to experiment with your messaging to reach the people you really want to reach, or to re-assess whether your target market is different from what you thought it was. 

Those are actionable metrics, as opposed to the vanity metrics I talked about in previous posts. 

So buying ads can be useful even if you don't make a single sale. (Although odds are you will make a sale if you are sharing good content with a simple call-to-action.)

Today I'm talking about dipping your toe into ad-buying, and a simple what-not-to-do. Don't click on "Boost Post" at the bottom right corner of one of your Facebook posts. Instead, go to ads.facebook.com and click "Boost Your Posts."  Here's why. 

If you click "Boost Post," here are the options you get: 

If you go to ads.facebook.com and click "Boost Your Posts," you get about 8 bazillion more options. (Yes, 8 bazillion is the official number from Facebook's own team.) 

Those include: 

"Detailed target" which allows you to find people who engage in some pretty specific behaviors. Such as... people who are likely to watch home improvement shows and have also recently bought a home in a particular zip code.

That's pretty specific targeting for, say, an interior designer. And it's just the kind of targeting you don't get if you click on "Boost Post" at the bottom right of the post itself.

So don't do it.