NEVER Use Instagram Boost Post! (Do this Instead)

Key Takeaways

If you have ever posted on Instagram, then chances are after your post is live, you have seen the big blue button that says boost your post. And chances are you may have clicked on that button or used it in the past. But in today's video, I want to show you exactly why you should never use the boosted post button inside of the Instagram app and what you should do instead. Because that button inside the Instagram app is basically a complete scam. It's going to charge you a 30% more than you should and it's not going to get you as good of results as you could get with this alternative method. But if in case you aren't familiar with what I mean, let me show you exactly why this button is a scam and why you should never use it. So, first things first is when you go into Instagram and you are looking at one of your posts. Here is one of my posts here. You can see it has the boost post underneath the profile. If I click inside of here, boost post, you can see Instagram is going to walk me through the flow in order to do one of these objectives. Either have people visit my profile and follow, visit a website, message me, or a mix of any of these actions. And you can see these are the different actions that I can take. Now, let's just say that we're going for visit profile. So, we're going to hit next here. Then the next thing is it's going to ask me to suggest an audience or I can create my own audience here, which is fine. That's those are nice settings here, but that's not what we're talking about. And then this is where we get to the daily budget. Now, inside of the daily budget, this is where you're going to start noticing something. Right here at the very top, it says, "What's your ad budget?" And then you can see right underneath it, it says excludes Apple fees and application taxes. This is the thing that I want to point out to you, especially on mobile, that if you use this, you're going to be overpaying. So, you can see here, let's just say that my budget is $10 a day for $50. You can see that is going to be an ad budget of $50. So, you would expect to only pay $50, but watch what happens when I actually go to check out here. You see the Apple fees are going to be calculated at checkout. We can hit next here. And then now I can go to actually add the funds. And when I get to actually adding the funds, then you're going to see exactly what that Apple service fee is and what the tax is. You can see it's going to add another $20 onto a $50 charge. So, a 30% increase just for running this boosted post on the mobile app. Now, if you are okay paying those extra 30% fees, then go ahead and be my guest. I know it's easy. I know it's convenient. But I wanted to show you two different options, a good, better, best if you will, in order to boost your posts inside of Instagram. So, what we just went through was maybe like the worst version, maybe a good version, but let me show you a better version on how to boost your post inside of Instagram. Now, the next best way to boost a post inside of Instagram is to actually log into Instagram on your desktop and do the exact same process that we went through. And let me show you what is different when you do it on your desktop. So, we're going to go through, we're going to grab the same post right here, and we're going to hit boost reel. So, we can go through and have the same settings where it's visiting a profile. And then you can scroll down here and have the same daily budget. So this one will be a daily budget of $10 a day and we will have this for duration of 5 days. So we'll put 5 days here and you can see the total is $50 here. But you'll notice something interesting here. So it says you're avoiding an Apple service fee by boosting this on the web instead of the iOS app. So you see they're being very clear here. This is actually the way that they want you to boost your post because then you don't have to pay Apple that 30% tax. If you want to learn more here, you can click on this and you learn more about why this is. But basically what it comes down to is that Apple has kind of a monopoly on the app store. And whenever there's a purchase through the app store, which is through your Instagram app, then they have to pay 30% of that to Apple. So in order to avoid that fee, all you need to do is log in on desktop and do the exact same thing and boost this post. Now boosting the post on desktop is for sure much better than boosting the post on Instagram app. But I do want to show you some flaws on doing this on the desktop or on the app and then show you in even the best way the way that I like to boost post inside of an account. So, the first thing that I do want to point out as a limitation is that the call to action or the optimization events that you have when you boost a post is somewhat limited. So, if you're okay just running a profile visit that goes for optimizes for followers, then that may be okay. Or if you just want traffic to your profile, that's totally fine. But if you wanted to actually optimize for sales to your website, that is where I would recommend the next method. Cuz you can see when you come here over here to visit website, you can change the call to action. You can send them to your website and you can even choose the call to action shop now. But this is still only going to optimize to send traffic to your website at the cheapest cost. it's not going to optimize to get people to your website to buy something at the cheapest cost to get the best return on ad spend. So, that's a small limitation there that if you really care about getting sales, you're going to want to actually run it through the next step that I'm going to show you. Now, the other limitation is if you want to target a more specific audience. You can see here when you look at who your ad should see, you can either target people similar to the ones that followed you, or you can create your own. You can come down here and you can do a location preference, a minimum age, but you can't do a full age range. So, say if you want to target people 25 to 45, you can't do that here. And then the audience suggestions here or here's where you can actually do the age range, the age 18 to 65. And if you click here, you can hit edit interest. And then inside of the interest, you can type out specific things like say people who are interested in pickle ball. And you can see it pulls up a good amount of lists here. But a lot of times this is still limited to the full capability of something like the Facebook ads manager. So if you're going in here and you're finding that the interests you're wanting to target are not available and you wanted to optimize more towards boosting your post to get more sales, then that's where I would recommend the third option, which is to run them on the Facebook ads manager. And inside of the Facebook ads manager, you just have to go through and create a Facebook ads account. So you will have to go through and do that step if you wanted to do this. I'll leave a link down below on how to set up a Facebook ads account. But once you're inside of your ads account, what you want to do is hit create here. And then inside of here, this is where you can choose your specific objective. So as I mentioned, this is where you can do either sales, leads, appointments, traffic, any of these different ones. So if I wanted to optimize towards sales, I can click here, continue, and then put these information in here. Then from this point, then you can scroll down and then just hit next on this. You can decide a specific budget. So, say that you wanted it to be a $5 budget, you can click here and then hit next. And then inside of this area, this is where you can actually get a little bit more targeted with who you want to show your ads to. So, once you're inside of here, you can choose the conversion location. So, for most people, you're going to want to go with a website. And then from here, you can decide which optimization event you want to optimize towards. So, if I wanted to optimize towards purchases, I could set this here. If you want to optimize towards purchases, you will have to have the Facebook pixel installed on your website. So, you'll have to set up that conversion event by clicking this little button right here. If you want a full tutorial on that, you can check out the link down below in the description. But if you only want to optimize towards traffic, then you could just click this right here and then optimize towards something like a landing page or a link click. So you can click there and then it will optimize towards a link click. Then if you scroll down here, this is where you can actually give more of an audience recommendation to Facebook. So you can click inside of here in the detailed demographics and this is where you can click this down and you can either browse demographics, interest or behavior or once again you can click in the same thing. Let's do pickle ball here and see if more things come up. And then you can see there are more options here inside of this search bar. So you can search for more things and target more people who you are wanting to. So once you're happy with the settings there and the audience, then you can go over to the next part. And from here, then you can see this is where you can connect your Facebook page or your Instagram account. So you can have a drop down here and grab the Instagram account. If your Instagram account isn't already attached to your Facebook ads manager, you can click on connect account here and then it will ask you to connect it to your Instagram account. Once that is connected, then that allows you to take any one of your Facebook post or Instagram post and run those as an ad. So then you can see from here what we can do is we can actually define the URL that we want to send people to from our boosted post. post. So, we're just going to send them to zokomarketing.com here. And then you can scroll down and then right here is where you can actually select the post that you want to share. So, setup creative or sorry, you actually want to scroll up here and then this is where you can select the post that you want. So, right here at ad setup, create ad. You can either create a brand new ad or you can use an existing post. And then this is going to pull all of the different videos from your Instagram account that allow you to run them as ads. So now I can come down here and I can select select post. And then here are all of the Instagram videos that I can just grab and run as an ad. So I can click here and then hit continue. And you can see now this is going to run as a boosted post on the right hand side here. And with this option, you're going to have the most control over your budget, the targeting, and the optimization event. And once again, it is also boosting your videos. But please, at the very least, I know that there's a lot of setup with the last step, but at the very least, just boost the post on desktop so you can not pay that 30% Apple tax. Hopefully, you found that help this helpful. And if you did, please don't forget to like and subscribe so that more people know about this. And we'll see you in the next