Anecdotally, based on my experience working with over 250 local businesses across the business spectrum, this doesn't reflect reality. A very small percentage of my clients "actively" use "organic" Facebook, an even smaller percentage use their ad platform (much higher usage of Google Ads). The ones that do (buy FB ads), typically do so through local "media company" who tack on their own fees, which in turn makes it a poor investment. I can count on one hand (out of hundreds) the number of our clients who effectively use Facebook. In fact, in the last couple of years, the number of businesses forgoing a "real website" and choosing Facebook (a common theme just a few years ago) has basically disappeared.
The only businesses still relying on Facebook are event-based: concerts, parties, exhibitions, etc. Because they use FB Events. But even Instagram is taking over in that area.
Other than that, Facebook business pages are just becoming a place for marketing to dump stuff.
Wait, are you talking about me?
In my post I don't even hint at anything even close to that, I don't have any bias against Facebook, the company or the website. I'm not even talking about the future of Facebook AT ALL in the post. I'm just stating some metrics we gathered at my last workplace that might be helpful for people using social media.
Are you sure you're not projecting, or being over-defensive?
Because the audiences are different?
The audiences for Starbucks Latte and Cappuccino are different. Starbucks is indifferent whether you buy one or the other though.
In my post I just mentioned which beverage my customers prefer, I never implied that Starbucks is closing or should close...
Facebook (the product) is an absolute dumpster fire that is primarily used to spread propaganda that Facebook (the company) is unable and unwilling to stop.
Facebook (the company) is doing just fine, because they quickly realized social media sites are basically dating sites, where each new age cohort attaches to a different one. That means Facebook (the product) can indeed be awful and not affect the company much since all the users just moved to Instagram.
My analogy would be that Yum Brands doesn't care whether you visit Taco Bell or Pizza Hut. In the same way Facebook (inc) doesn't care whether you visit Facebook or Instagram.
I think that you're being a bit over simplistic, there is a lot of decision making based around company component performance, poor sales number within the Facebook native platform may influence more money being redirected to support Instagram which might end up as a personnel cut in an extreme circumstance.
1. Reeeeeally loosely defined, since AFAICT Facebook isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
I have an interesting approach. Maybe it falls flat on its face, but maybe it could work.
Create a "liberally themed" Facebook clone and onboard a bunch of people during the run up to the election. Give them tooling under the guise of campaigning, but also get them to use Facebook like features.
Ban any conservative thought or commentary. It's harsh, it's undemocratic, but it plays into the attack. Especially if you can drum up press coverage on Fox News.
Hypothetically, a polarized platform could create a stir. Maybe liberals on Facebook get interested. Maybe it leads to a small migration. This furthers the right-leaning polarizarion of Facebook's userbase, causing more liberals to flee. Thermal runaway.
This "Facebook is for Republicans" narrative is aided by the recent rumors that Zuckerburg has been meeting with Republican leaders about campaign advertising.
If you completely brain drain Facebook of the liberal demographic and make it skew far right, are the engineers, predominantly liberals, going to continue to be excited coming to work to build that product?
I think it's an interesting approach. It's far-fetched and kind of sneaky, but I'd love to see something like this attempted.
It would prove a new vector of attack for entering the social space. Something that even Instagram might be vulnerable to.
That seems less an indictment of the performance Facebook ads, and more of an indictment of local Facebook ads consultants. As an experienced marketer, I can tell you that in most niches, ROAS from Facebook ads done correctly vastly outperforms that of AdWords ads. AdWords tends to deliver higher quality traffic, but at a CPC that is so much higher than Facebook that it makes Facebook’s lower quality traffic the better buy.
https://www.investopedia.com/news/facebook-google-digital-ad...
Between Facebook and Google. Facebook has about 34% of the ad spend (36.2 + 19.2)/19.3.
Have to chime in here. I run a small brick and motor business with a membership model (climbing gym).
FB/Insta are paramount to our marketing and communication. Like the parent comment said, people like to say they don't use Facebook/Insta but that doesn't seem to be true at all.
Our ad budget on FB is an easy choice and is the only method of adverts that have given us any sort of consistent return. Groupon can get people in the door as well, but then you need to convert them directly with strong sales. It's good, but hard.
Organic FB/Insta are also the best way for us to communicate with our members/community about events, specials and closures. People check these platforms all the time. I believe these work so well for us because of the visual aspect of our business. If we were more informational, perhaps email would be a better tool.
I fantasize about not using Facebook properties, but it would come at a tremendous cost to the business and our community.
On the other hand, my family's bookshop relies a lot on social media to get the word out. I suspect social media is more important for businesses that aren't viewed as necessities or are competing with convenience. (people tend to view wellness, beauty, anti-aging, facials, etc., as necessities if they depend on them regularly even though they aren't true necessities, which is why such industries tend to fare well even during recessions)
This probably isn't all Facebook's doing, but just the changing nature of how people get their information. Before Facebook, it was TV ads and ads in the newspaper, but nobody viewed those platforms as being nefarious. Now people are on the internet and watching cable less and less, so something's got to take the place of TV ads.
We found that:
- Our market was too niche and local for adwords to be super effective. We basically didn't have enough volume with productive keywords to make it work, and broadening the keywords resulted in alot of spend for junk results. It did pull in some people though.
- Facebook, Instagram and Bing ads were useless.
- Facebook and Instagram content was shared by the community and generated conversions for events. They didn't make a dent in new admissions/tours.
- Many people saw and were were excited by Waze ads, but no new folks were attracted to it, and existing people used it as a lazy way to navigate to school/church. It was interesting though, I literally had people coming up to me to tell me how cool Waze was, which was surprising.
- Newspaper ads were expensive, but generated 5x more response than all of the other channels.
- Signs, lawn-signs and flyers were expensive in terms of labor, but 2x more response than newspaper.
This matches my experience working for small biz owners as well. It's funny, years ago we (techies) all told these business owners what a waste "traditional" advertising was. "Shift your print/radio/tv ad budgets to digital" we said, "it's trackable" we said, and now it's shifting back as digital ads are not returning the same value thanks to ...very accurate tracking. Meanwhile, local radio was destroyed and rebuilt, local print is also currently rebuilding (not quite there yet) and TV is becoming more affordable as they have to now compete with digital.
We (a local micro-business) tried tracking our print adverts by including coupons and found nearly the only people using them were current customers.
Direct word-of-mouth was by far our most successful advertising (either from customers, or staff handing out leaflets in the street).
IMHO the latter. Returns were and are always terrible, with occasional "home runs" that then get parroted by every marketing guru as an example of how powerful social marketing campaigns can be. But of course, your plumbing business, or accounting firm doesn't have the same business model, market or customers as said example.
My point is that social media is no worse, or better than traditional marketing, it's just that, we can prove it's terrible with data. Of course, if everything is "terrible" ... none of it is.
Well, it's just advertising that's terrible. Businesses can spend their money in lots of different ways. If advertising is understood to not be effective, perhaps we'll see more investment in things like wages and product quality, which, unlike advertising, deliver real social value.
It's funny because I was going to comment on that about the escape room of my SO and about how Facebook in her case was quite ineffective. I was taking care of her campaigns because she isn't tech savvy at all. I was spending 150$ a month on Facebook and the same amount on Google Adword, but we had a much better return on Google.
There wasn't much advertising for escape room on Facebook for our area either, so that may explain why. There's quite a bit of them on Google Ads, but we only have ads on Google Adword for now.
I'm not the best in advertising though and didn't spend that much time on it, so we could most probably optimize that quite a bit and maybe then Facebook could be better. We are exclusively on Google now and I did optimize it a bit to reach 4.75% CTR. I have an hard time tracking correctly the conversion with Resova (we are going to migrate out of them too, so I won't spend too much time on it either) so for now CTR is good enough.
Or is the advertising "discovery" more organic, in that escape room ads are just showing up in people's FB timeline or alongside unrelated Google searches (or on sites that display Google ads), and people think "oh, neat, I like escape rooms, I should try this one"?
Originally I was planning to put them all on Facebook because I was expecting our market to be there (young adult who want to do something with friends). I was only taking ads on Google because even with the exact name, the result was too far. I was planning to remove it but as the CPC was much lower than on Facebook, I kept it with a few dollars per day.
> I'll do a web search, or possibly open Google Maps on my phone and search for it.
That what seems to be happening. Google Maps is one of our best source of conversion. During the first 12 months my SO asked most people where they found the escape room and a majority were from Google Maps. On Google My Business their stats show that in the past 30 days it was displayed 20k times, which is quite good. The CTR isn't amazing but it's still something and the number of calls is actually not too bad considering that I don't expect most people to use the call button of Google Maps to book.
I'll probably try to pay for ads on Google Maps and Waze soon.
Facebook serves the same niche as the local newspaper used to. Those newspapers are disappearing, and people pay little attention where they do. Everybody reads Facebook. (If the "kids" have moved away from it, well, they're not really our target market anyway.)
No they don't. Far from it.
> Those newspapers are disappearing, and people pay little attention where they do.
Local newspapers are coming back. There are at least three glossy free newspapers where I live (published weekly or monthly) that are packed full of local advertising and local news stories, local identity profiles, etc.
That's technically correct but some 1.6 billion active daily users is kind of a big deal. "Everybody Uses facebook" is about as close accurate as you're going to get for an "Everybody does X" claim this side of "eats".
I can confirm there are certainly people who don't use Facebook. I'm one of them and don't have any regrets dropping the platform years ago. It's just a boomer-meme-filled wasteland now.
Locally things look a little better as long as you aren’t in a metro that is dominated with bogus traffic. Works great for small business outside of major metro areas.
Facebook Messenger is like the ultimate opt in for contacts. People you don’t know at all get filtered when trying to contact you, but people you know tangentially or see once every few years are still reachable. I would have no reason to have this person’s number.
There are plenty of people that I might contact about something but I wouldn’t have their number.
I was also planning a surprise for my wife’s birthday and coordinating for her to have a girl’s night out with her friends. I wouldn’t have her friends numbers, but I was able to message them.
Because the subscribers weren't willing to pay the full cost of producing these papers, the publishers would let local business owners pay them to include their own blog posts advertising their business. The people reading these papers each day would learn about local businesses and events from these advertisements.
Everyone likes to say they don't use Facebook, but they do. Or at least 10 people they know do.
Local businesses use Facebook relentlessly because, lots of times, it actually works to get people in the door or calling your number. Small businesses almost have to use its ad platform (in my opinion). I don't think local businesses can afford to look away from a top performer like this.
When I ran an escape room business, my fill-rate on weekends was typically dependent on whether or not I was spending money on Facebook. Google ads were second. Anything else barely had any ROI. Well - in the first few months of running the business, the local newspaper actually brought in some people, but nothing compared to my longer ad runs on Facebook.
I feel like this is a "you don't need Facebook" chant, but I feel that's not true for all industries, and I hope the take-away here is that maybe a huge online business with a giant ad budget can find other means, but if you are a small local business with $300 a month for marketing, I personally believe that you kind-of need Facebook.