Straight answers

Do boosted posts work?

What the boost button is actually doing

It is a deliberately simplified version of the ads platform with most of the controls removed. You lose the ability to choose a proper conversion objective, to build the audience precisely, to structure creative tests, and to see which variation produced which result. What you keep is a single button that reliably spends your money.

Because the default optimization is engagement, Meta does exactly what you asked: it finds people likely to react to a post. Reacting to a post and hiring a roofer are unrelated behaviors.

When boosting is genuinely fine

• Putting a genuinely newsworthy local announcement in front of your existing followers.
• Amplifying a post that is already performing organically with your own customers.
• Testing, very roughly, whether a piece of creative gets any reaction at all before building a real campaign around it.

What to do instead

Run a proper campaign built for leads: a real hook, a specific offer, zip-code targeting, several creative variations tested against each other, and conversion tracking so you know what a lead cost. That is not a harder version of boosting, it is a different activity — and it is the reason media buying is a craft rather than a button.

If your budget is genuinely tiny, you will get more out of fixing your Google Business Profile than out of boosting, and it costs nothing.

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