I started writing this response in the YouTube comments of a video I recently watched. I then realised it was perhaps a bit long. So to the blog I go! If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, have a watch of a video that was posted by Veritasium in relation to Facebook Ads calling it very boldly “Facebook Fraud”.
Let me start off by saying this: I’ve never had any of these problems, ever. I have paid for Facebook Ads for myself and for clients and it has led to real and genuine enquiries to the page.
The author of the video starts off by talking about a page called “Virtual Bagel” and a dated experiment run a year & half ago. He discusses that the page gained it’s large amount of likes by using the Boost Post button – ignoring the fact that the advertising tools have changed dramatically since a year and half ago (more so in the last month). The boost post buttons are placed on your pages purposefully to make it easy for the people who are time strapped and not marketing people to easily start advertising.
Any marketing person worth their salt, should be doing the following:
Use the ACTUAL advertising tools instead of the “Boost” buttons. These are only for people who aren’t marketing people who won’t understand principles of advertising on “ANY” medium. Facebook is just making it more accessible.
When we run advertising, we focus primarily on a mix of interests. We use graph search to determine the interests of people who like my Facebook page; constantly testing and measuring results as we go along. I ALWAYS run what is called split testing on different types of Facebook ads. The ads might have different words or different pictures or even might be placed in a particular area on Facebook. It might be only promoted to people using Facebook on mobile vs people on desktop. We do this to measure the type of engagement response/click through – because different people like different things.
Veritasium also brought up the issue of engagement and this is based on so many many different factors.
Breaking down engagement on Facebook Ads
1. Do you actually have your “target” market on the page?
Assuming there is an actual target market in the fake ad tests – people that like cats – just doesn’t seem to be something of much substance. “Everyone” is certainly not a proper target market. People that like cats isn’t that far off of “Everyone”. It scares me how often I hear “everyone” as an answer when I ask the question. In any marketing, it doesn’t matter if it’s social media, television, radio – having a target market is important.
As an example of one of my “target audiences” is as follows:
People who like:
- Social Media;
- Marketing;
- Travelling;
- Meditation;
- Photography;
- Business;
- Small Business Page Owners who live in Perth, Western Australia;
- and are friends of people who have already liked my page who are between 25 and above.
Now I might split that up into different sub-categories or target based on male vs female and test the response of different ads towards those audiences.
2. Are you posting when your audience is online?
Are you posting often enough? On average we post anything from 2 – 6 posts a day at different times of the day, why? Simply because people aren’t spending every waking second on Facebook. It might seem like they do – I’m pretty sure most of these people have jobs, lives, children, sleep.
You have to be aware that at that time of posting it might not be as interesting as the updates of their friends (their volume of friends + the number of times they post compared to the amount of times you post will vary throughout the day.)
3. The type of posts that you share either don’t have a call to action, or are all one type of post
The most common problems I see are:
All blog posts – this takes your audience away from your Facebook page. Which is fine if it’s your content and they’re going to your website. Otherwise they’re only going to get distracted with t.h.e.i.n.t.e.r.n.e.t. and forget to go back and comment. Is anyone really surprised about this? Really?
All video/YouTube posts. If your audience are mostly on mobile – playing streaming video isn’t exactly friendly to your data plan.
All pictures of cat meme and content taken off other peoples pages or worse off Google images. Aside from this actually breaking copyright law and in turn violating Facebook T&C’s; Facebook treats this content as crap content. So it doesn’t get viewed as much because your friends content will be ranked higher in the News feed.
If anything, this video has helped to highlight one main issue and for most of our clients they’ve heard me bang on about this constantly. Being successful with Facebook is NOT about the likes. It IS about the brand advocacy and conversation or “talking about” quality content is what drive this.
For more tips, read 5 Things to Change in Your Facebook Strategy Right Now.
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