Thanks to guest blogger, Brian Carter
On November 13th, Brian will be my featured guest on the Marketing Blab at 11:30am MT (10:30am PT, 1:30pm ET). Please join us. In the meantime, enjoy Brian’s insights on the 12 good, bad and ugly things about Facebook marketing in 2015.
I think the real problem is that Facebook is easy to do poorly – and many businesses don’t put enough time and training into it. So they feel like they’ve wasted their money. They probably have, because the companies that don’t succeed with Facebook marketing are lukewarm about it and go with half-measures.
They don’t allocate enough time or money to it. They shut their brains off when they hear anything too complicated about how to get results.
I’m still trying to make Facebook marketing more simple and more certain than it is – but there’s only so far you can go. There’s only so much of the learning curve we can short-cut.
The information about how to get results with Facebook is out there – if you haven’t found it or learned it, don’t blame Facebook for your lack of results. BOOM!
So here’s a list for you. . . the good, the bad and the ugly. And let’s do that in reverse order, since in order to be credible I have to attack one of the platforms I recommend? Yep, that was sarcasm.
Facebook: The Ugly
• No customer support for companies they haven’t identified as strategically important.
• Some companies sunk a ton of money into fans, assuming (even though it has never been the case and Facebook never promised this) that they would always be able to reach those fans for free. Emails are more valuable than Facebook fans.
• If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can waste a ton of advertising money and not get any profits. This is also true about Twitter, and to a lesser extent AdWords and Bing. (LinkedIn is just hard to even get a lot of clicks from.)
• Facebook traffic won’t show accurately in Google Analytics without URL parameters, and you have to do custom javascript to track conversions if you’re using Facebook Connect to get leads.
Facebook: The Bad
• There is a sharp learning curve for Facebook marketing, even if you already know how to do other types of digital marketing well. Facebook is a different medium, so you will have to market and communicate differently on it than other platforms. The ad platform is quite different from AdWords and Bing.
• Facebook marketing requires even a professional at least 5-10 hours a week of work, if you’re doing best practices. That includes time for advertising, posting and customer analysis.
• Not every business gets satisfying results from marketing on Facebook. (But this is also true of AdWords, Bing, Twitter, LinkedIn – and every marketing option…)
• Facebook changes its features frequently. I believe they’re trying to be agile and to improve performance based on data- but people hate change and unhappy people sometimes are more vocal than happy ones.
Facebook: The Good
• Biggest social media platform in the Western world – over 1 billion potential customers for you.
• Advertising with the most sophisticated targeting we’ve ever seen, with costs about 32x more affordable than TV or radio, and you can start for just $1 a day.
• Facebook is fundamentally positive, with no dislike button, so major PR problems are less likely to happen on Facebook than any other social platform. Of course, any company can screw up and no platform can save them from that.
• Facebook gives you the ability to learn more about your customers than you’ve ever known, which means you’ll be able to do all your marketing in all channels, even traditional ones, better than you could before.
What, if anything, do you find good, bad or ugly about Facebook marketing? Please share your thoughts below because I’d love to hear from you. Thanks and here’s to your sweet success.
About guest blogger Brian Carter: Brian Carter is the #1 bestselling author of The Like Economy, LinkedIn for Business, Facebook Marketing, and The Cowbell Principle (read Brian’s guest post on my blog about “How Your Cowbell Can Increase Your Joy“). He is respected as an international authority on how organizations can generate bigger business results. His 18 years of business success guide The Carter Group, a boutique agency with world-class expertise using digital/social marketing and advertising to boost profits for growth-minded businesses.
