Is Facebook A Black Hole Marketing Strategy?

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Most digital marketing professionals change their opinions on Facebook every day. On some days, it's the best tool they have for engaging with users, conducting market research, and generating traffic to their website. On other days, Facebook is a frustrating, self-serving, unethical, unfriendly, unhelpful, time-wasting and money-wasting pain in the ass.

How can you make sense of that in order to decide if you want to include Facebook as part of your marketing efforts? This post will explain everything you need to know, but first, an answer to the question that we posed in the headline:

Is Facebook a black hole marketing strategy?

The answer is that yes, it can be. You have to go in with your eyes open and understand how Facebook works. You also have to accept how the company operates and maintain realistic expectations. You also need to think long-term. If you do all these things and still decide that Facebook is a good fit for your business, you can actually use it to make a profit.

Different Ways Of Using Facebook

The first thing to understand is that there are two Facebooks, at least from a business perspective. The first is your Facebook business page, which is "free". In other words, it's free to set up and publish posts. The "second Facebook" is the Facebook ad platform.

This article is concerned with the former - running a business Facebook page. You can use the ad platform and get good results while putting in minimal effort to your Facebook page - all your ads can simply direct people to your website. If you want to do this, go for it. There is actually very little downside, as you can spend small amounts of money initially, and then test, measure, improve, and test again. If the ads work, you can scale them. If they don't, you can abandon them.

Running a Facebook page is a completely different affair, however. It is Facebook business pages that cause the most frustration for businesses and marketers, and is also the tool that can quickly see you tumble into a black hole of wasted time, money and effort.

Here are the steps to take so you avoid this black hole:

1. Learn what's important to Facebook and why it does things the way it does
2. With this understanding, figure out if Facebook is a good fit for your business
3. Put in place the foundations of a good strategy to make it work

Understand How Facebook Thinks

One of the most common frustrations that businesses have with Facebook is that hardly anyone sees their posts. As an example, it is typical for post reach to be less than 10% - and often less than 5%!

In other words, if you have 1,000 likes on your Facebook page, you can expect your posts to be seen by between 50 and 100 people. That's not many, right?

The argument from businesses goes something like this:

"If someone has liked my page, they must be interested in it, so why is Facebook not showing them my posts?"

It's a reasonable question to ask, but to find the answer, you have to look at what is important to Facebook.

Before we do that though, let's look at what is NOT important to Facebook:

* Your Facebook page
* Your Facebook posts
* Everything else you do for free on Facebook

Facebook doesn't care about any of these things.

The only thing that Facebook cares about is its users. Everything it does as a company, and everything EdgeRank does (EdgeRank is Facebook's algorithm) is aimed at its users. It is a business, after all, and its profits and potential for profits are dependent on users. This applies to the ads it sells, the data it collects, and all of Facebook's other monetisation strategies.

Therefore, the only thing that is important to Facebook is that users log on regularly and stay for long periods of time. When this happens, Facebook can show them more ads (and make more money) and collect more user data (and make more money).

When you grasp this, it makes sense that Facebook doesn't show your posts to more people - after all, it only shows posts to its users that it thinks those users will like. If it doesn't, then it risks those users getting bored and going somewhere else.

Understanding this fact is the first step to creating a Facebook marketing strategy that works.

Don't Do Facebook If...

Now let's get down to some decision-making. If any of these apply to you, Facebook is not the solution and you should focus your marketing efforts elsewhere:

* You need direct action - to make posts that Facebook wants to show, you have to be creative, fun, interesting and entertaining. Direct selling is not part of that list.
* You are not in it for the long term - Facebook is about building a community and following over the long term
* You don't want to invest in content creation - you either have to spend time in-house creating creative content, or you have to pay someone to do it for you. There is no third option.
* You don't want to spend money on ads - when you need a direct sales message delivered, you will have to buy ads. When you want to reach more people, you will have to buy ads. When you want more likes, you will have to buy ads. In general, you will probably, at some stage, have to buy ads.
* Your audience is not on Facebook - this is a no-brainer. Be particularly careful if you sell B2B. This is not a strict rule, but Facebook is usually more effective for B2C targeting.

Top Three Tips For Making A Facebook Marketing Strategy Work

1. Focus on your audience - study your audience and create content for them
2. Be creative and follow the 90/10 rule - a minimum of 90% of your posts should be non-sales posts
3. Buy Facebook ads - to make Facebook work properly, it will cost money

Facebook doesn't have to be a black hole marketing strategy, but you will have to work hard to avoid it.
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