The big take from this is not the effectiveness of Facebook for marketing, since it can and is done successfully, but rather a rant by marketers on the amount of exposure Facebook's algorithm gives them.
The situation is that brands small and large spent lots of money building up a following, but when they post something it only gets exposed to a fraction of the followers. The argument is, why should I spend money getting 100k followers if you only show my posts to 15k (or less) of them at any given time.
On one side, more brand exposure degrades the Facebook experience from ad inundation, on the other side marketers are not seeing the value for time/money invested.
This has always been the thorn in the side of not just Facebook, but most ad driven revenue models. Since Facebook is a social experience it's a challenge that's tricky to navigate, they can't exactly bend over to marketing products and services, that would be a disaster, but the tools and feedback for marketers leaves a lot to be desired.
Indeed. There's nothing wrong with Facebook as an advertising channel, when used effectively and with expectations properly calibrated.
There's a lot wrong with blindly throwing money at a Facebook "fan page" and an ostensible following, expecting miracles to happen and any of those followers to care. (There's also a problem involved in paying for the fans, then reaching a fraction of them with each update -- but that's the nature of how Facebook works, and that shouldn't have been a mystery to most marketers for quite some time now.)
What we're experiencing right now isn't a "revolution" in advertising, as the article suggests. But then again, it's the marketers' fault for expecting there to have been one in the first place. They bought, traded, and sold the hype. Big brands made relatively blind, multi-million-dollar commitments to Facebook and other social channels before stopping to think about what, exactly, they were hoping to achieve.
What those brands are learning today: there's no such thing as a magic bullet. There's no such thing as a free lunch. There's no such thing as a "revolution" in marketing. Nothing will allow you to grow a fanbase, increase engagement, and sell more products without an ounce of forethought and hard work.
Facebook is a channel, like any other. It can be a very effective channel. But like any channel, it needs to be thought through, analyzed, and used properly. The blind honeymoon is over. The platform's usefulness remains.
>> There's a lot wrong with blindly throwing money at a Facebook "fan page" and an ostensible following, expecting miracles to happen and any of those followers to care.
This has actually been by far the worst way of making money off of Facebook in my experience - and I do this full time.
Agreed. The whole "fan page" thing can be a total money pit unless a marketer knows exactly what he's trying to get from the investment.
Conversely, I've had fantastic results from targeted ad buys on Facebook. In particular, mobile app install buys. Great results, decent tracking, easy to analyze from an ROI and LTV standpoint.
Just because you can target people by #anything doesn't mean they'll care about your content. Your content has to fit what you're targeting and whom you're targeting. I feel as though a lot of brand marketers -- ordinarily extremely smart people -- lost their senses about this when they first jumped on the Facebook bandwagon. I've seen some very sophisticated AdWords buyers treat Facebook like a Magic 8 Ball, for instance. It blows my mind.
The situation is that brands small and large spent lots of money building up a following, but when they post something it only gets exposed to a fraction of the followers. The argument is, why should I spend money getting 100k followers if you only show my posts to 15k (or less) of them at any given time.
On one side, more brand exposure degrades the Facebook experience from ad inundation, on the other side marketers are not seeing the value for time/money invested.
This has always been the thorn in the side of not just Facebook, but most ad driven revenue models. Since Facebook is a social experience it's a challenge that's tricky to navigate, they can't exactly bend over to marketing products and services, that would be a disaster, but the tools and feedback for marketers leaves a lot to be desired.