Facebook is not a social media platform

Richard Lord

Facebook is a wonderful platform for brands to engage with their audiences. It has grown from 4.8 million monthly active users to 13 million in just four short years. That is a growth of 171%. What other media channels do you know of that have shown that kind of growth?

Furthermore, some 60% of those 13 million people visit the platform every single day – that is 7.8 million individuals. To put that number into perspective…the most watched single TV episode in South Africa in 2015 was an episode of Generations and that had an audience of 6.3 million viewers.

And to further sing about Facebook’s audience credentials, those 7.8 million daily visitors to Facebook look at their newsfeed an average of 14 times per day. Try getting that frequency on radio!

So Facebook is big. Very big. And people visit it a lot. Sounds like the perfect media platform, right?

Let me sell it a little more…not only is it big, and offers extraordinary frequency, but it is arguably the most targeted media platform in the world. Sure TV allows you to target moms, or sports fans, and radio can let you speak to people living in greater Johannesburg, and business press allows you hone in on the businessman. But the reality is that for all of the targeting ability that those platforms afford, they are still quite blunt at the end of the day. Just because you flight an ad on CNBC doesn’t mean that you will only reach business people. But with Facebook you can!

Facebook knows more about you than you know about yourself. They know your name, where you live, where you work, who your friends are, where you friends live, what your friends do, the places you visit, your political views, your sexual orientation, your relationship status – past and present. They know what brands you like, who your sporting heroes are, whether you are a coffee or a tea drinker, and where (and when) you last went on holiday. And they make all of this information available to advertisers to use in order to ensure that you are speaking to exactly the right people for your brand.

Taking it one step further, they even let you match your CRM database with their users so that you can up-sell and cross-sell to your existing customers, or clone that audience so that you can attract new users to your brand.

So you can show an ad encouraging people to book a test drive for a new car only to people whose motoring plans are about to expire. Own a pizza shop in Welkom? You can show ads exclusively to pizza lovers living within a specified catchment area of your store, and furthermore show them the ads only at dinner time while they are watching TV. Try doing that on TV or radio.

So why then are so few advertisers keen to spend significantly on Facebook? I think it is because whilst Facebook has evolved as a mass reach advertising medium, most advertisers still see it as a social media platform that is only good for managing relationships and answering customer queries, and not as a sales platform.

123RF

Facebook has evolved. Sure it started out as the place where a brand could have a page and gather followers, and the brand could then send feel good messages to those followers. In fact fan acquisition then became a major marketing KPI because it gave an advertiser a free platform to communicate to potentially large numbers of people. But that ship has sailed. Facebook’s algorithm has been limiting just how much a brand can talk to their fans…to somewhere between 2-5% at any given time. Sure, if you have really good and engaging content you can push that number up a bit, but you can no longer speak to all of the fans that you’ve acquired.

Why have Facebook done this? To improve the user experience. They want users to see the content that matters to them, friends, family, kittens, posts asking others to post something to their wall in solidarity with this cause or that (some of you will and I think I know who you might be). Facebook doesn’t want their users bombarded by 30 branded messages before they get to see what their friends got up to on the weekend.

So now Facebook is saying if a brand wants to reach significant numbers of people, they need to buy ads. Sounds a little unfair right? I mean surely Facebook aren’t in this just to make money, right? So why should a brand buy ads? Well for all of the reasons I’ve outlined about – the reach, the frequency, the targetability…hang on, that sounds familiar! Isn’t that why we buy ads on TV and radio and in newspapers? Absolutely! But now you can reach even more people, even more often and be far more selective about who gets to see your ads.

Facebook is no longer a social media platform. Yes, our consumers are there to be social, but we need to start seeing Facebook for what it really is – a mass media platform that allows us to talk to the right people with high impact and minimum wastage.

But what about all that touchy feely stuff like engaging with your audience, and getting them to like, comment and share your stuff? Isn’t that what Facebook is about? In my humble opinion, no, not anymore. Research has shown that 90% of people who buy your product as a result of having seen a Facebook ad, never clicked on it, never liked it, never shared it, and never commented on it. They saw it. It made an impact on them, they remembered it, and they bought your product as a result of it - but they never “engaged” with it. Therefore using such metrics to measure your success on Facebook is old school.

Facebook needs to be seen as the reach platform that it is, and we need to move back to traditional media buying principles of reach and frequency. After all, reach and awareness and sales are directly proportional…the more people that see your ad, the greater your awareness will be, and the more sales you will make.

Who cares if someone likes or comments on your ad?

This article was originally posted on The MediaShop Blog.