There is no one right way of doing this. I just went to my magazine shelf and grabbed as many different magazines as I could.
Der Spiegel(1) (Germany’s most widely read news magazine) nearly always puts authors’ names at the end of articles.
brand eins (2, a German business magazine) puts the names of authors, illustrators and photographers right at the start of articles.
11Freunde (3, a German magazine about soccer culture) also puts authors’ names right at the start, as does Slanted (4, a typography magazine) and the German Wired (5).
So bylines are pretty common, but not everyone uses them. Putting names at the end of articles seems perfectly acceptable, also.
I think we'll end up seeing a few more of these stories before we get sick of the trend and bury them.
Facebook's only real profit driver at the moment is advertising to it's captive user base, however the ad's aren't that good to start with. It feels half hearted like they've gone, 'hey we'll stick some ad's....there', that's great they're all in one place at the right where I can ignore them.
I think a lot of people will start revising how much money they want to spend in terms of advertising and pull back from the least effective, which could very well be Facebook.
(interesting side note, the most effective corporate Twitter accounts I've found are the ones that don't bother trying to sell the product every 10 minutes, see Betfair Poker and Waterstones UK for good examples).
We had a similar level of traction adverstising nametoolkit.com (shameless plug but we all do it on HN). The visitors we got from Facebook seemed completely lost, but yet the cost per click (CPC) we ended up paying was notably higher than the CPC from adwords.
We tried Bing also, and they were really great at customer service; some guy talked to me for over an hour about various things we could try and they always got back quickly, but the CPCs were absurdly high.
This has nothing to do with Facebook. They just picked the wrong marketing channel. How do you expect a "great" response for a packaging business (that too B2B) on facebook.
There are effective two modes of advertising on the internet:
1. where the user seeks (search ads etc)
2. you push the ad on the consumer (content ads, facebook ads as of now)
#1 is clear and has a good enough match always.
To be on #2 - you got to appeal well to the audience. Facebook works wonders for food, travel, gifts and more. All things that qualify for impulsive buys. It is important to understand the marketing channel.
I can certainly understand the author's frustration with Facebook advertising, and for what he's selling, it does make more sense to use Google than Facebook or Twitter.
I don't think that's an indictment of the site, though.
Facebook and Twitter are mediums for sharing and discussion. Traditional commerce feels a bit off, at best. If you want to use them to promote a business, you have to be participating in them on the same level.
I've used Facebook ads to promote a magazine and a podcast. In both cases, I saw much higher returns than with Google. I was asking people to come to the Facebook pages for the magazine and the podcast, and each page had a healthy amount of discussion and community because there was content for people to coalesce around. In our case, the ads did act as a primer for a more viral expansion, because there was something people could do and share on our pages.
I don't think Facebook is ever likely to become a good place for a 150-year-old B-to-B packaging service to do business. That shouldn't spell doom for the packaging service or for Facebook.
Also I think there is a big of a general problem with how people approach internet marketing and that is as a result of hype.
In the real world, there's a difference between promotion and advertising. You promote first and advertise once people know who you are. Then you run well-targetted advertisements aimed at the audience you want to reach. It's easy to forget that on the internet.
Often times people omit the low-cost promotional tools and run straight to the advertising. That's a big mistake in most cases.
I say:
1) Set up a Facebook page for your business
2) Learn to blog
3) When you are ready to try an ad campaign put a lot of legwork into it. Also look into site-specific advertisements for sites in related territory, etc.
Advertising is hard to get right. It always is. I would agree it's not an indictment against Facebook. It is an indictment of the hype of internet advertising though.
Promotion? Like posting an article about a trending topic on link farm thejournal.ie and hire a bunch of mturks to upvote on hackernews.
I like how they claim to have written the article before the facebook news (and only published after) -- and claim their business has been around longer than it has.
I suppose, like everything in life, there is no "one size fits all" solution to advertising. Just because FB works for someone, it doesn't mean it'll work for everyone else (same for Google, Twitter etc) and vice versa.
I wish there was a site, that had a list of online advertising success stories, and what strategies worked in each case. So if I am a 150 year old packaging business, I can simply look up businesses similar to mine, and see what kind of advertising worked for them. Of course, there is still no guarantee that it will work for me, but chances are a bit higher than blindly going to FB.
Only problem is that sites like google that use a bidding system for ad placement - those small businesses don't want your competition there raising the CPM prices. So they may not be likely to share the places where they have a good ad return!
This would be great but is, unfortunately, naive. These are exactly the kind of learnings that businesses benefit from by keeping private.
Sharing these tips with your competitors, especially in a scenario like this where you'd literally drive up the prices of your own ads, doesn't make much sense.
Just because FB works for someone, it doesn't mean it'll work for everyone else
To me, the question right now is whether Facebook works for anyone.
I'm genuinely interested, because I've seen media-reported stories of many different kinds and sizes of organisations experimenting with advertising with Facebook, and I honestly can't recall a single one that had a happy ending. I realise that, as they say, the plural of anecdote is not data, but anecdotes can certainly suggest a pattern worth investigating.
"Facebook and Twitter are mediums for sharing and discussion" I quit Facebook because it was a horrible place to have a discussion, people are conservative/not as honest when they have the eyes of that many people on them.
This is what happens when business owners don't educate themselves before venturing into social marketing.
Facebook is not a one stop marketing shop. It won't light a fire under a business unless a) that business is worthy of the fire b) that marketer is very proficient.
It sounds like neither a nor b were satisfied in this case.
Were the owner to spend more time educating his or herself on social marketing, I feel they would have received better results.
It does seem he did some research, how much is unknown. I'm curious, at what level of education must one have to successfully advertise on Facebook? Because if it's a serious learning curve then that's a problem for Facebook to solve if it wants more advertising dollars.
True but most businesses are small business without the time or resources to really do the research. Every unemployed twenty-something is now becoming a "Social Media Marketer" and telling small business owners they have to get on Facebook to boost sales. Along with that every business blog promotes Facebook and Twitter as excellent ways to boost business despite the fact that it only works for certain types of businesses and even then those that it works for need to do a lot of homework before they get the promised results.
I don't blame any business for a lack of success on Facebook. I blame everyone promoting it as a business booster. When the whole world is screaming that you've got to get on Facebook you can't blame a small business owner for believing it.
How can you not blame the business? If you are big enough to start a business, you should be big enough to run it right. That means doing research before entering a marketing channel.
> everything I read about maximising your web presence and impact told me that SMEs must integrate and embrace social media, especially Facebook
This is where he went wrong; signing up to Facebook because a book said a business needs a Facebook page to be successful online is the wrong approach. If you can't explain why you're making a Facebook page it probably isn't going to work, even if you have no knowledge of Facebook as a platform you should still have knowledge of human behaviour.
We're not a traditional business (we're an internet forum) and we have close to 100,000 likes at the moment, the value of having likes is seriously overstated, we get maybe ~300 click through's when we post an article and engagement is dropping more and more, in fact the same can be said of Twitter, we have ~6000 followers and get similar click through rates when we post something. They're not bad to have (Facebook page, Twitter account) but they aren't worth the time investment in most cases.
It seems now that liking a page on Facebook or following a twitter account are hollow gestures that don't really carry any weight in the future.
My local sandwich deli has now decided to go all "social media". They have a big sign on the counter saying "please like us on facebook" and when you buy a sandwich the staff ask you if you are on facebook.
Something about the whole approach just feels wrong in a way I can't quite put my finger on. It just feels like them asking me to do what is basically a meaningless mechanical chore.
I've been wracking my brains to think of how I would try and exploit social networking if I was running that business but so far I have come up empty.
To start, exclusive coupons for their Facebook fans, posted every so often.
Afterward, perhaps a create-a-andwich contest. The winner is voted on by the community and the sandwich is available for a limited time. Successful sandwiches are added to the permanent menu.
Engagement for a sandwich place can be light. Just simple things that either directly benefit fans or don't require much from them.
Auto generate a coupon / QR code for everyone who likes you
Then if any of their friends uses that coupon code (by flashing their iPhone at the till) then that original person gets ten points on their loyalty card
I think frankly that a social graph is best employed using graphing friendly rewards - mostly that is the social dopamine thing in our brains, but affiliates also work
I have seen a gas station with no less than 9 big flags in front of it, saying that you get $X off when you check in at Facebook. I guess it might work because you read the name of a friend in the same sentence as the business. It might work even better with sandwiches, because that's something you can actually recommend. (Gas is all the same.)
> They have a big sign on the counter saying "please like us on facebook" and when you buy a sandwich the staff ask you if you are on facebook.
Personally, I dislike this sort of approach. If I need to like something to get something in return (sometimes a coupon or a download), I usually un-like the thing immediately thereafter and try to scrub all traces of it from my wall.
Yes, this is going against the spirit of the exchange, but it's my FB account (in as much as I can say it is), not yours.
Admittedly, I'm not a huge Facebook user, so maybe this is ignorance on my part, but...
If you're already in the store buying a sandwich, why are they even promoting the Facebook account? When I buy a car, the salesman doesn't ask me to go watch their commercial on TV afterwards.
Does the number of "likes" factor into how often their ads get served?
By liking them, you're advertising them. Your "like" factors into your friends getting an update saying "jlarocco likes the Super Sandwich Stall", and thinking "huh, I should go and try that place".
It's somewhat meaningless now, admittedly: I might not speak for everyone, but I've basically tuned out anyone "liking" anything on Facebook as white noise.
I've been wracking my brains to think of how I would try and exploit social networking if I was running that business but so far I have come up empty.
IME, social networks are awesome for raising publicity if you can get your real fans to tell their friends about you, if whatever you do is something that will be genuinely interesting to those with common interests (which of course friends tend to have). It's a networking effect, a real-time version of good old word-of-mouth advertising, which has always been by far the best kind to have.
Weaker personal actions such as likes, follows, mailing list subscriptions and all that jazz might have some benefit, but I don't believe it's anything like as much. I'm thinking this is because these are personal expressions of interest, but in reality they probably have little if any networking power.
I lack faith that any sort of paid Facebook advertising will even have a positive RoI, based on a few small-scale experiments that I personally know about and on media reporting of larger organisations not doing any better. I suspect a lot of people treat these ads much as they would treat junk mail: just another form of spam to be auto-ignored, and probably subject to banner blindness by now.
Well, in the case of one partner of my startup, it tells you that the KPI for a given marketing campaign is number of likes added, and some companies are willing to pay out the nose to get them.
I think, if as a business you have not bought your likes, then they do imply something.
For example, some of our competitors have around 10 times to 50 times the likes as us. But the difference in reactions to a post we might make is no where as much - they could be just 1.5 times to 2 times or even less.
Also, businesses indulging in purchasing likes, to showcase their fan base(really?) has perhaps contributed a lot to FB Ad purchase so far. So the past year or so, can be called the 'like' wave of FB/Social. The future is interesting!
i don't use facebook so correct me if i'm wrong, but doesn't liking a page have a similar effect to following on twitter, in that people who have liked your page will see your updates in their feed? the number of people who like you is irrelevant maybe, but if they're all subscribed to your marketing updates that's not nothing.
theoretically yes, but in reality it isn't that simple. Through Facebook insights I can see that for a post we made last week (to the page with 100k likes that I mentioned above) was shown in the timelines of 20,000 people and was "engaged" by just under 400 (this means they either "liked", clicked the link or shared or commented on it). So while it isn't "nothing" it's substantially less than you would expected.
Put another way, you got 400 customer interactions for free, many resulting in additional sharing of your content. Isn't that worth something in a world where an Adwords clickthrough can cost $10+?
The article is a cautionary tale about the myths around using social media to generate sales. There feels to be a belief that if I am on twitter, Facebook etc this will boost my image and sales. Reading the saga of others social media advertising is expensive and ineffective.
The pain is in first attracting the right people to click your advert. Then you need to get them to buy something. With such low conversion rates, the cost per click is too high for many to justify.
We seem to be getting more of these types of articles. I haven't seen one yet that declares facebook advertising a raging success for a business.
All of the responses to these articles are usually "they're doing it wrong," which is more of an indictment of facebook than the multiple users who try out advertising and see no positive results at all.
I agree, this is where people are not understanding the issue. If Facebook is to make it on advertising then it needs to be understood by all how to "do it right" or it will fail. Facebook is different than Google and this article shows what I'm willing to bet is a common result, advertisers do not see a decent return on their investment. If the people paying the money don't see the return they need, or expect, then that's a serious problem for Facebook.
If I had a lot of success with ads on facebook, I would keep it quiet, so negative reviews (which there are quite a few these days) lower prices.
Another thing to consider is that facebook was (still is?) in a quiet period due to IPO, and once it's over we will definitely see some good examples of how facebook ads work.
"I made $100,000 with Facebook ads in 3 months". Would you like to hear how? (True story by the way.) But like you said, people are reluctant to share successes, by fear of being copied.
Facebook is a medium for brand awareness. It's just like the traditional TV adverts. You don't really expect the viewers to run to the store and buy your product after viewing the advert. You want them to remember your product when they shop for their needs in your category.
People are getting bad ROI with Facebook because, they are comparing it to the ROI to the ads on Google. Ads on Google tend to have much higher ROI because they usually represent users already in need of your category of product. This is like people handing you shopping brochures when you go to a mall. You are clearly out to shop and hence the ROI on brochures will be higher.
I work with fb ads, there is no way to get any information from people who click on your ads apart from the fact they fit the demographics you set on the ad.
I'm thinking he might have conflated two points: you can see the demographic breakdowns of people who click various ads, and the list of people who 'like' your page is, of course, public.
They can see a list of people that like they page. They can only see the information you've made public on your Facebook profile just like anybody else who is on Facebook but not on your friends list.
We did a similar campaign for our family business, with a much smaller budget (and area). We received a lot of likes, I think we spent $50 total and got about 150 new likes. The value for us was not click-throughs to our online store, but the ability to directly communicate with our customers. We run special Facebook specials, and let people know when we get new products they might be interested in. If we have something we really want people to see, we can run a sponsored story. We've had a few people come in looking for deals we've posted on Facebook, so we know at least some people see them. I'm not sure if it has paid for itself as far as pure revenues are concerned, but I think keeping customers informed and aware of your existence is a little undervalued currently.
Facebook ads are good for facebook games and other facebook apps, though. This is not a small market, and a significant revenue for facebook. Otherwise, it's true that google ads will get you better results for targeted ads. It's clear to me that facebook is not going to make lots of money from advertising. They do have the potential to become a huge media distribution platform for entertainment (which they already do for social games and 3rd parties like spotify).
Reading this article and giving it some thought, gives me a small "aha" moment. Many people have compared FB Ads to TV Ads. Below are two specifics, I think, that will apply to FB Ads in that context:
1. TV had that kind of control as to interrupt people and give them no choice. But despite that they have to fight against people switching channels, as soon as an Ad appears on one.
The difference in case of FB is that one can easily choose to ignore the Ads. As you and me do. (Is it to fight that ignoring of the Ads, that on several occasions it is laced with a mild sexual overtone, at least the way the picture looks?)
2. By extension, of the TV Ad anology, FB Ads are for big brands. Meaning CPC is irrelevant, but big brands compete to be just visible to people, by just being there on the RHS.
(This one I have not read anywhere so far. But surely it can't be only me who has thought of it)
Direct marketing doesn't get discussed much on HN and realted posts don't seem to get much traction (c.f. http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=direct+mark...). I think it's a topic that could use a could hand-holding tutorial for startups. How to select a DM agency, how to build a target mailing list, and so forth.
"Time to look at the number of our own website visits clicked through from the Facebook pages. Result? Two! €160 quid for two clicks, each of whom looked at two site pages."
If your wanted end result is for people to check our your website, use fb ads to link people to your website. Better yet, you can use a page post link ad that displays both your fanpage (with a "Like this page" button) and the link to your external site, with a thumbnail.
>Once my helpers stopped liking, I had expected the viral phenomenon of Facebook to generate more and more likes as the contagion of their likes spread to their friends and colleagues via their own Facebook pages.
You expected your page to go "viral". Your page for packaging products ... to go viral? The people who care about your packaging products are far between on Facebook. The people who care about packaging products will go into google and type "packaging products", or come from your existing referral base, or from leads generated by your sales department. It isn't critical for every business to have a facebook page or a twitter account.
//
Cats love boxes, maybe you can go viral by hitching your wagon to that meme bandwagon =)
Social media strikes me as inappropriate for the vast majority of B2B businesses.
In the course of some freelance work I came across a dental supply company where you could "share" or "like" every single product. I have yet to see business case for a customer publicly "liking" spit cups or custom-engraved toothbrushes. Or their FB friends wanting to know about it. Or any of that resulting in a sale.
For any marketing to work, you have be where your potential customers are. Yes, technically your B2B customer is on FB or Twitter, but for personal, not business reasons. Would you want your company's office supply company calling you at home?
Online marketing dollars for B2B are much better spent on search ads, where you have demonstrated interest and intent, or on display ads on industry-specific sites, or a social media presence where an industry-specific community already exists, e.g. on forums, or talking directly to your customers on Twitter.
i bet he will get more business from this one free HN mention than with anything he can do on FB, especially in his business. not all business models lend themselves to social marketing, not by a long shot. i'm a developer for a US floor heating manufacturer and we recently started the whole social thing, other than people posting reviews on our fb page and liking us (which is good), there have been no direct sales...it's just a bad fit.
As mentioned by others in these comments, it's when you "like" something that the owner of that page can see who you are. If you click an ad they can't. I think.
114 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 230 ms ] threadThe author is named Peter Faulkner.
No, a tag blob not a substitute for a proper byline.
There is no one right way of doing this. I just went to my magazine shelf and grabbed as many different magazines as I could.
Der Spiegel(1) (Germany’s most widely read news magazine) nearly always puts authors’ names at the end of articles.
brand eins (2, a German business magazine) puts the names of authors, illustrators and photographers right at the start of articles.
11Freunde (3, a German magazine about soccer culture) also puts authors’ names right at the start, as does Slanted (4, a typography magazine) and the German Wired (5).
So bylines are pretty common, but not everyone uses them. Putting names at the end of articles seems perfectly acceptable, also.
—
(1) http://www.spiegel.de
(2) http://www.brandeins.de
(3) http://www.11freunde.de
(4) http://www.slanted.de
(5) http://www.wired.de
Facebook's only real profit driver at the moment is advertising to it's captive user base, however the ad's aren't that good to start with. It feels half hearted like they've gone, 'hey we'll stick some ad's....there', that's great they're all in one place at the right where I can ignore them.
I think a lot of people will start revising how much money they want to spend in terms of advertising and pull back from the least effective, which could very well be Facebook.
(interesting side note, the most effective corporate Twitter accounts I've found are the ones that don't bother trying to sell the product every 10 minutes, see Betfair Poker and Waterstones UK for good examples).
This is exactly how I feel. The only time I ever click a Facebook ad is to tell Facebook that it's not what I'm looking for.
We tried Bing also, and they were really great at customer service; some guy talked to me for over an hour about various things we could try and they always got back quickly, but the CPCs were absurdly high.
There are effective two modes of advertising on the internet: 1. where the user seeks (search ads etc)
2. you push the ad on the consumer (content ads, facebook ads as of now)
#1 is clear and has a good enough match always.
To be on #2 - you got to appeal well to the audience. Facebook works wonders for food, travel, gifts and more. All things that qualify for impulsive buys. It is important to understand the marketing channel.
I don't think that's an indictment of the site, though.
Facebook and Twitter are mediums for sharing and discussion. Traditional commerce feels a bit off, at best. If you want to use them to promote a business, you have to be participating in them on the same level.
I've used Facebook ads to promote a magazine and a podcast. In both cases, I saw much higher returns than with Google. I was asking people to come to the Facebook pages for the magazine and the podcast, and each page had a healthy amount of discussion and community because there was content for people to coalesce around. In our case, the ads did act as a primer for a more viral expansion, because there was something people could do and share on our pages.
I don't think Facebook is ever likely to become a good place for a 150-year-old B-to-B packaging service to do business. That shouldn't spell doom for the packaging service or for Facebook.
In the real world, there's a difference between promotion and advertising. You promote first and advertise once people know who you are. Then you run well-targetted advertisements aimed at the audience you want to reach. It's easy to forget that on the internet.
Often times people omit the low-cost promotional tools and run straight to the advertising. That's a big mistake in most cases.
I say:
1) Set up a Facebook page for your business 2) Learn to blog 3) When you are ready to try an ad campaign put a lot of legwork into it. Also look into site-specific advertisements for sites in related territory, etc.
Advertising is hard to get right. It always is. I would agree it's not an indictment against Facebook. It is an indictment of the hype of internet advertising though.
I like how they claim to have written the article before the facebook news (and only published after) -- and claim their business has been around longer than it has.
I wish there was a site, that had a list of online advertising success stories, and what strategies worked in each case. So if I am a 150 year old packaging business, I can simply look up businesses similar to mine, and see what kind of advertising worked for them. Of course, there is still no guarantee that it will work for me, but chances are a bit higher than blindly going to FB.
Sharing these tips with your competitors, especially in a scenario like this where you'd literally drive up the prices of your own ads, doesn't make much sense.
To me, the question right now is whether Facebook works for anyone.
I'm genuinely interested, because I've seen media-reported stories of many different kinds and sizes of organisations experimenting with advertising with Facebook, and I honestly can't recall a single one that had a happy ending. I realise that, as they say, the plural of anecdote is not data, but anecdotes can certainly suggest a pattern worth investigating.
This page will probably be taken down to avoid conspiracy theorists like me.
The bubble is coming folks.
Dear Trolls,
Time for a lolocaust on HN.
"Long live the neckbeard. Down with the startup scene."
Copy paste the above !! +1 if you use sock puppets.
Seriously, you are affecting people's life you don't confess about this hideous fad and the devil's nest(VC's).
"Long live the neckbeard. Down with the startup scene."
"Long live the neckbeard. Down with the startup scene."
"Long live the neckbeard. Down with the startup scene."
"Long live the neckbeard. Down with the startup scene."
"Long live the neckbeard. Down with the startup scene."
Why didn't he make a poll about his products and tell his customers about it?
Facebook is not a one stop marketing shop. It won't light a fire under a business unless a) that business is worthy of the fire b) that marketer is very proficient.
It sounds like neither a nor b were satisfied in this case.
Were the owner to spend more time educating his or herself on social marketing, I feel they would have received better results.
I don't blame any business for a lack of success on Facebook. I blame everyone promoting it as a business booster. When the whole world is screaming that you've got to get on Facebook you can't blame a small business owner for believing it.
This is where he went wrong; signing up to Facebook because a book said a business needs a Facebook page to be successful online is the wrong approach. If you can't explain why you're making a Facebook page it probably isn't going to work, even if you have no knowledge of Facebook as a platform you should still have knowledge of human behaviour.
We're not a traditional business (we're an internet forum) and we have close to 100,000 likes at the moment, the value of having likes is seriously overstated, we get maybe ~300 click through's when we post an article and engagement is dropping more and more, in fact the same can be said of Twitter, we have ~6000 followers and get similar click through rates when we post something. They're not bad to have (Facebook page, Twitter account) but they aren't worth the time investment in most cases.
It seems now that liking a page on Facebook or following a twitter account are hollow gestures that don't really carry any weight in the future.
everything I read about maximising your web presence and impact told me that SMEs must integrate and embrace social media
He did his research. He's reporting back it doesn't work.
It seems to me that the entire point of him writing this article was to warn other SMEs to not take that advice at face value.
My local sandwich deli has now decided to go all "social media". They have a big sign on the counter saying "please like us on facebook" and when you buy a sandwich the staff ask you if you are on facebook.
Something about the whole approach just feels wrong in a way I can't quite put my finger on. It just feels like them asking me to do what is basically a meaningless mechanical chore.
I've been wracking my brains to think of how I would try and exploit social networking if I was running that business but so far I have come up empty.
Afterward, perhaps a create-a-andwich contest. The winner is voted on by the community and the sandwich is available for a limited time. Successful sandwiches are added to the permanent menu.
Engagement for a sandwich place can be light. Just simple things that either directly benefit fans or don't require much from them.
I think frankly that a social graph is best employed using graphing friendly rewards - mostly that is the social dopamine thing in our brains, but affiliates also work
In fact - is this being done?
Disclaimer: I am the cofounder of this company.
Source: Taiwan
Personally, I dislike this sort of approach. If I need to like something to get something in return (sometimes a coupon or a download), I usually un-like the thing immediately thereafter and try to scrub all traces of it from my wall.
Yes, this is going against the spirit of the exchange, but it's my FB account (in as much as I can say it is), not yours.
Sad.
If you're already in the store buying a sandwich, why are they even promoting the Facebook account? When I buy a car, the salesman doesn't ask me to go watch their commercial on TV afterwards.
Does the number of "likes" factor into how often their ads get served?
It's somewhat meaningless now, admittedly: I might not speak for everyone, but I've basically tuned out anyone "liking" anything on Facebook as white noise.
IME, social networks are awesome for raising publicity if you can get your real fans to tell their friends about you, if whatever you do is something that will be genuinely interesting to those with common interests (which of course friends tend to have). It's a networking effect, a real-time version of good old word-of-mouth advertising, which has always been by far the best kind to have.
Weaker personal actions such as likes, follows, mailing list subscriptions and all that jazz might have some benefit, but I don't believe it's anything like as much. I'm thinking this is because these are personal expressions of interest, but in reality they probably have little if any networking power.
I lack faith that any sort of paid Facebook advertising will even have a positive RoI, based on a few small-scale experiments that I personally know about and on media reporting of larger organisations not doing any better. I suspect a lot of people treat these ads much as they would treat junk mail: just another form of spam to be auto-ignored, and probably subject to banner blindness by now.
Especially as there is no dislikes. What do 30, 1000 or 10000 likes tell about your company ? At what point do they measure success ?
For example, some of our competitors have around 10 times to 50 times the likes as us. But the difference in reactions to a post we might make is no where as much - they could be just 1.5 times to 2 times or even less.
Also, businesses indulging in purchasing likes, to showcase their fan base(really?) has perhaps contributed a lot to FB Ad purchase so far. So the past year or so, can be called the 'like' wave of FB/Social. The future is interesting!
The pain is in first attracting the right people to click your advert. Then you need to get them to buy something. With such low conversion rates, the cost per click is too high for many to justify.
All of the responses to these articles are usually "they're doing it wrong," which is more of an indictment of facebook than the multiple users who try out advertising and see no positive results at all.
Another thing to consider is that facebook was (still is?) in a quiet period due to IPO, and once it's over we will definitely see some good examples of how facebook ads work.
People are getting bad ROI with Facebook because, they are comparing it to the ROI to the ads on Google. Ads on Google tend to have much higher ROI because they usually represent users already in need of your category of product. This is like people handing you shopping brochures when you go to a mall. You are clearly out to shop and hence the ROI on brochures will be higher.
Whoa, what? Advertisers can see my Facebook profile if I click their link? Talk about oversharing...
Second, your question doesn't add to the discussion (thus a downvote). Mind your manners please.
Page owners can see who likes them, and if your info is public they can view them as any other fb user.
1. TV had that kind of control as to interrupt people and give them no choice. But despite that they have to fight against people switching channels, as soon as an Ad appears on one.
The difference in case of FB is that one can easily choose to ignore the Ads. As you and me do. (Is it to fight that ignoring of the Ads, that on several occasions it is laced with a mild sexual overtone, at least the way the picture looks?)
2. By extension, of the TV Ad anology, FB Ads are for big brands. Meaning CPC is irrelevant, but big brands compete to be just visible to people, by just being there on the RHS. (This one I have not read anywhere so far. But surely it can't be only me who has thought of it)
He will miss out on the truth. Which is that direct marketing will help get the results he wants.
A pity.
But don't worry. Im working on that.
If your wanted end result is for people to check our your website, use fb ads to link people to your website. Better yet, you can use a page post link ad that displays both your fanpage (with a "Like this page" button) and the link to your external site, with a thumbnail.
You expected your page to go "viral". Your page for packaging products ... to go viral? The people who care about your packaging products are far between on Facebook. The people who care about packaging products will go into google and type "packaging products", or come from your existing referral base, or from leads generated by your sales department. It isn't critical for every business to have a facebook page or a twitter account.
// Cats love boxes, maybe you can go viral by hitching your wagon to that meme bandwagon =)
Audience is totally wrong. I'd never try to sell anything in FB.
In the course of some freelance work I came across a dental supply company where you could "share" or "like" every single product. I have yet to see business case for a customer publicly "liking" spit cups or custom-engraved toothbrushes. Or their FB friends wanting to know about it. Or any of that resulting in a sale.
For any marketing to work, you have be where your potential customers are. Yes, technically your B2B customer is on FB or Twitter, but for personal, not business reasons. Would you want your company's office supply company calling you at home?
Online marketing dollars for B2B are much better spent on search ads, where you have demonstrated interest and intent, or on display ads on industry-specific sites, or a social media presence where an industry-specific community already exists, e.g. on forums, or talking directly to your customers on Twitter.
I'm never clicking another FB ad again - it's kinda scary how much information the advertisers can get about their fans!