Platforms
1 min read

Three ways Facebook is letting down marketers

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I believe 2017 will go down as the year Facebook “jumped the shark,” defined by Urban Dictionary as the moment “…when something that was once great has reached a point where it will decline.” With all the measurement trust issues swirling around Facebook, 2017 will be the year when advertisers start calling the shots — not through demands, but by making different and diverse choices with their budgets. While Facebook will remain a vital part of a marketer’s toolkit, the new reality means we must adapt with new strategies appropriate to these trust-challenged times.

1) Facebook campaign ROI (effectiveness)

Advertisers have a hard time answering basic ROI questions because it’s hard to translate “Likes” and “Views” into business results. This challenge is made all the worse by both the fluidity and expansiveness of the platform. Thriving amidst the churn requires skepticism mixed with tactical shifts:

  • Be ruthless in clear goal-setting, with metrics that are specific to conversion or traffic building. Steer clear of “Likes” or “Shares” as success metrics, and see them rather as useful indicators to tweak campaigns.
  • Diversify your social buy to ensure a healthy, competitive and well-populated social ecosystem. It’s clear Facebook dominates, in part, because it’s efficient to “scale” with a minimum of labor. Yet social scale needs to be intimate with quality engagement, a challenge for Facebook. An alternative to achieve scale with quality is to create custom influencer networks via influencer mapping solutions like Little Bird. Aggregating large audiences through leveraging influencers can give advertisers comparable scale, but at a human, quality level.

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