If you’re familiar with social media marketing, then you must very well know the significance of making a good first impression with your ads. That being said, with so many social media channels out there, adopting a precise and productive strategy is very hard. And the so-called advertisement landscape has evolved dramatically over the years. A relatively new development is the use of social media marketing, with social media being a valuable asset to a host of advertising tactics. Social media helps build businesses, connect with your audience, and ultimately increase sales. But the question is how to make the most of social media advertising to drive sales and increase traffic. Two such social media advertising strategies adopted by businesses around the world are Dark Posts and Boost Posts.

What is a Dark Post?

There seems to be some sort of confusion around the term called dark post, like what they are and how do they work. For instance, there are countless articles on the web that can walk you through it. They are seen as some kind of sponsored ads by a lot of channels. Dark posts are targeted ads on social media channels like Instagram and Facebook that can only be seen by a certain selected target audience but do not appear on the users’ timeline. They are very different than what you know as ‘dark social’, which refers to the traffic to your website from social media that is not detected by analytics tools. Facebook’s dark posts are similar to those ads that show up on your News Feed but they do not show up on your Timeline or in the feeds of your fans or followers organically. Instead, they just show up in the users feeds you might be specifically targeting. Dark posts are posts that only exist for the targeted users.

What is a Boost Post?

Boost posts are a type of paid advertisement effort meant to boost the declining organic reach of your website or business or product you’re promoting. Boost posts are sponsored ads that show up on your Timeline and promote a specific post to get the attention of your targeted audience for that specific post instead of the whole page. For instance, a Facebook boost post is a kind of Facebook advertisement which can create exposure for some specific posts or image on your own Facebook page. They are meant to boost the reach of your targeted audience outside the reach of your current followers. However, they are different from your regular Facebook ads which are created in Ads Manager. Instead, you can pay more to boost your posts to an audience of your choosing, and you can track real-time stats on how your ads are performing.

Difference between Dark Post and Boost Post

Ad Type

 – Boost Posts are a type of paid advertisement campaign for social media platforms like Facebook to promote an existing post from a business page in order to widen the reach of your target audience. Boost Posts are not like your regular Facebook ads which are created in Ads Manager. Dark Posts, on the other hand, are targeted ads which do not appear on your Timeline or in the feeds of your fans or followers organically; instead, they show up as sponsored content in the feeds of the users you are purposefully targeting.

Exposure 

– Dark posts are posts that are only meant for the targeted users and they are not published the same way as organic posts or boosted posts. They are meant to boost targeted campaigns and can only reach a precise audience. In fact, dark posts have relatively less interaction than boost posts but they certainly cost more. Boost Posts, on the other hand, amplify the reach of your targeted audience outside the reach of your current followers. So, they are considered more effective and receive more organic reach on an average than what you get with dark posts.

Objective

 – The purpose of Boost Posts is to get the attention of your audience for a specific page on your page instead of the whole page. The objective of Boosted Posts is to make you focus on page engagement, website clicks, and local business promotions, in order to boost organic engagement and amplify your reach to a much wider target audience. The idea is to increase the visibility of your post to be seen by more people. They are more sophisticated and are precisely targeted to reach users based on several variables such as age, gender, or areas of interest.

Dark Post vs. Boost Post: Comparison Chart

Summary of Dark Post vs. Boost Post

The purpose of Dark Posts is to reach your marketing goals by refining your ads and organic content. They are certainly very different from sponsored posts or boosted posts, which focus on page engagement, website clicks, and local business promotions. Boosted posts are expensive and more effective. However, they are beneficial only until the money is flowing. The moment you stop spending on posts, your traffic will probably go down. Dark Posts, on the other hand, are a long-term solution to this problem; they are precisely targeted for the users that see them and to others, they are just dark posts, meaning they do not appear on their timeline either.

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