What is your Facebook strategy?
Facebook crashed hard yesterday and it got me thinking about how many businesses out there rely on them for advertising. While it’s always been a great platform to build a large community for your products, that isn’t likely for most people. Facebook isn’t geared to direct people off their platform and on to your website, unlike search marketing.
- Facebook attributions are hard to justify.
- Why FB suits large groups.
- Why search marketing results in sales.
- Don’t rely on the big platforms for business.
Transcript
Want to talk to you a little bit today about Facebook. As you know, I’ve had a mixed relationship over the years, if you’ve been following the show, with Facebook. Initially, when they brought out their Facebook Ads, it was about eight years ago, I don’t know how long ago it was. I was really excited. I called them scary, creepy, good ads. But that was because the data I was looking at was completely false, and when I say completely false, I mean, attributions in Facebook are very, very hard to justify when you look at all the channels together and what, say, something like Google Analytics will say, or even feedback from users.
Emotional Scrolling
Now, having said that I’ve got some clients where it does actually work well and that is because they have communities on Facebook, and we’ve talked about this before. They’ll have large groups with 100,000 people in them or whatever, and those people are familiar with the brand. So, it makes sense that if you’ve got a lot of customers who primarily use that platform, who are familiar with your brand or learned about your brand through that platform, then you probably should be. But if you’re not doing a lot in that medium, and let’s face it, that’s a lot of time and effort. If you’re selling, I don’t know, welding equipment hoping that you’re going to build a community of welders on Facebook, it’s unlikely I would say, right?
So, I was talking to a potential client, I guess you call them, yesterday and they were saying, “Well, everyone is on FB, on Facebook.” And I’m like, “Well, yeah, they are. But that doesn’t mean they want to get off Facebook and come and buy on your site.” And that’s an important difference, right. Because as we know, and there’s been a story this week as well, that Facebook is basically just manipulating everyone’s emotions to basically get them upset or keep them emotionally, I forget what the word they used. But basically it’s nothing new. We’ve known it for a long time.
And I have a question about if people are in a medium that’s manipulating them emotionally to keep them scrolling through their feed how does that translate to buying things? I don’t think it works that well, as opposed to other channels, like direct … Well, no, not direct marketing, but search marketing, where you’re actually looking for that thing that you’ve made a decision to buy. You made a decision to research or buy. That’s not what you’re doing on Facebook, right.
Build Your Asset
So today when we had the massive Facebook outage worldwide of all of their properties, WhatsApp, Insta, I think it was another one employer forum. I think that’s the Facebook. I don’t know what it is, but it’s Facebook related. Someone told me, let me know in the comments. It’s a very, very good time to have a think about what’s happening to all those people that you’re spending money on Facebook to try to get them to your site. What you should be doing, and this goes for Google as well, is you should be driving that traffic to your site, and you should be capturing the details of those people on your site. So you’re building your asset, and you’re not relying on a third party platform because the algorithms have gone crazy, right.
About, just over a year ago when we had all the fear mongering and propaganda going on, I got together … I was part of a group of 3D enthusiasts where we all decided to help Open Source building 3D printing ventilators. Facebook just banned that ad yesterday … Ad, it wasn’t even an ad. They just banned my post yesterday for spam or disinformation or something. And it was posted over a year ago.
Now I’ve got a bucket load of posts because I got on Facebook again last year. After that, which I would expect to be flagged, it looks like retrospectively and my account might get banned, right. So, there’s so many … The algorithm’s gone feral or something. I don’t know what’s going on. But there’s all this weird stuff happening with the algorithm. Even in Google as well, this applies too. So, for instance, with Google we have this new three strikes policy, which just came into place. That basically means if you have these violations, X three violations, then they might shut down your ads account. Now, you might think, “Oh, well, selling guns or trying to be a bit dodgy ads.” But it doesn’t have to be that. It can just be something as simple as … Well, I’ve seen it with barbecue smokers, right. Barbecue smokers get a policy violation because the algorithm is associating them with cigarettes. So, it’s that sort of stuff that happens, right. And I’ve seen even more ridiculous ones.
So that’s why it’s so important if you’re using these third party platforms, which we are because let’s face it advertising online is pretty much monopolised now. And we need to be building our own databases and being independent as much as we possibly can. But using those platforms to generate new business. To generate new customers who aren’t aware of your brand. You shouldn’t be relying on Facebook to bring existing customers back to you, that should be your email database.
Hopefully that’s helpful. And just have a look at that graph this morning. Everyone go, “What’s going on Facebook? Oh my God.” And Telegram had a nice big spike too. Just be aware of that, when these things happen, it’s a good time to sit back and go, “Okay, what am I doing to build my own asset?” As opposed to just keeping Google being funded and Facebook being funded and all the rest. That is for your new clients, new traffic, right. But get them back home. Hopefully that’s helpful. See you next week. Don’t forget to like, share and subscribe. Thanks for watching. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
