Issue 12: Learn How Your Business Can Get More Value From Facebook - Part 1.
Social media effort vs reward in 2022.
Hello Big Ponders!
Welcome back. There’s so much I want to say about Facebook, we’re going to have to tackle it in two parts. First part will be concepts with context for local business, second part will be actionable advice. Buckle up and let’s get going.
By the way, if you have a better suggestion for the name given to a group of smart people who subscribe and read the Big Pond newsletter, let me know. Otherwise, Big Ponders it is.
Top 3 Facebook Issues For Local Business
We all know how tough social organic reach is to achieve.
Every year we see ads are getting more expensive, and harder to measure their value (as in measure Return on Ad Spend or ROAS).
Naturally, businesses are unhappy that things don’t appear to be getting any better. So where will your new business growth come from in 2022?
To create new opportunities for growth, the following challenges must be solved.
Businesses of all sizes are struggling to get the results they are used to out of Facebook ads. Local businesses need a new approach to measuring FB investment value.
Facebook ad ROAS is broken because it has to guess the data it can’t see from iOS devices like Apple phones and tablets. Measuring your user funnel behaviour is a must.
Facebook organic reach is incredibly challenging for local business who persist with it out of habit, not because FB organic posting is an effective tactic - it isn’t unless you amplify best performing posts.
At Big Pond this is what we talk about - how businesses can solve these issues and get more value out of Facebook. Getting your creative right has rarely been so important. It’s time to be bold.
The Recipe For Popular Content
Here’s what we know about content that trends on social.
Static text posts and static images are boring to many audience types. If you’re going to use them as a format choice, they need to be capable of interrupting people’s scrolling habit.
If a life insurance company can get press using PR about movie fatalities (“Guardians of the Galaxy tops list of deadliest films with 83,871 fatalities”), the only limit is our imagination.
What’s to stop a local veterinary business using dinosaurs as a hook, or law firms pointing out that contracts need to be signed before the guitars at Hampden outdoor gigs can be turned up to 11? Local business promotion does not have to be boring. EVER.
The best creative ideas often woo back users with fun creative concepts that often build on a previous piece. Today that means video. Beyond that, the metaverse. That’s what we mean by creative digital worlds.
Kids are already living in creative digital worlds such as Fortnite, Minecraft or Roblox, and Facebook aims to turn itself into a similar destination. But if organic reach is unattainable for small business, and reaching a wider audience is less likely, why choose Facebook over TikTok, Twitch, Discord, or SnapChat? Younger audiences are leaving Facebook very quickly.
Facebook’s uncool brand with limited organic reach, lower user volume trends, and a broken ad ROAS metric is a recipe for real danger for social media’s biggest whale.
Meta’s Feb 2022 earnings call and the $220bn share price wipe out.
Before we address the biggest challenge facing local business - Facebook’s broken and leaky ROAS reporting - let’s take a minute to understand where it fits within the big picture.
For a start, if Facebook genuinely cared about local business it would not have reduced organic reach to almost nothing.
What it does care about is younger age groups spending a lot less time on Facebook and Instagram in favour of TikTok and Snapchat.
Static images do not drive engagement. At least, not in the way video stories and reels do.
Financial media are questioning the future of the metaverse. Is it a bet gone wrong from Facebook?
They ask if the billions of dollars in cost of Zuckerberg’s vision is worthwhile for investors, advertisers and the global audience of people who use Facebook every day.
I ask this instead. When did Facebook stop being fun? And is the future of social media centralised and controlled by Zuckerberg / web 2.0, or decentralised and controlled by a community / web 3.0?
Where there’s people, there’s likely going to be ads or at the very least some kind of marketing - even if it’s only peer approval or word of mouth. It’s natural to talk about the things we enjoy and want to share that with others.
In order for local business to grow, it has to reach new potential clients and retain customers no matter the outcome of the next phase in social.
If Zoom can turn the video chat service industry on its head in 2020, decades after the video chat Silicon Valley winners were previously announced, Facebook’s position as number one in social media is never 100% certain.
Facebook’s Feelgood Factor is Missing
Companies who make money from managing ad accounts on Facebook are unlikely to bite the hand that feeds. On the flip side, there’s no shortage of industry criticism of what experts believe Facebook is doing wrong.
The world needs more love and empathy right now in the aftermath of a global pandemic that cost more lives than people are willing to process, dismissing numbers without taking a moment to see each one as a life lost - in a game of whataboutery.
Fun, feel-good content can be a great approach.
Great Power, Great Responsibility
The power to do good was ignored by Facebook’s desire to increase shareholder value and choose short-term goals over long-term integrity.
It is astonishing that Zuckerberg ignored the impact this would have on Facebook’s desirability as a place to advertise, and indeed, as a place to connect with friends and family.
As an ad platform used by local business, if it cannot deliver easy to understand and accurate Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) then what exactly is it good for?
Local Advertising Challenges
In marketing, where and how you advertise can impact perception.
Many people and big brands like Patagonia are looking at Meta/Facebook as an increasingly toxic brand, where the majority of the highest shared links in the US are hard right conservative media, and its core revenue stream of advertising has a fundamental flaw - Facebook ROAS reporting is utterly unreliable and broken.
In Their Own Words
This is why Zuck says they are “rebuilding a lot of our ads infrastructure”.
Even Facebook’s second-in-command, Sheryl Sandberg cannot spin the fact that “targeting accuracy decreased”, driving up advertiser costs.
None of this is new. In fact, this is merely the culmination of the deterioration in Facebook ROAS reporting over the last 2-3 years.
The difference is that brands have fired the old agency, hired a new agency, and are now realising that very few people seem capable of solving this ROAS reporting challenge. In-house teams without data science are not faring much better.
Facebook’s Advertising Nightmare
Ad agencies have had over two years to solve the iOS tracking and reporting situation for clients.
Repeatedly telling the client what the problem is, over and over, without a proper solution is not why companies pay Facebook management fees.
Old habits and ways of managing Facebook ads are often now counter-productive. Why? In a machine learning world where advertisers have to find the balance between the cost of training a model with your company’s level of budget, patience, brand recognition, funnel setup to warm up cold audiences.
Unless you are a huge brand, at a small to medium business size level it can take 8 weeks minimum to train an ad model to identify your prospective customer and create conversions at the ROAS your business needs. This is subject to multiple caveats so it’s easier to simply say this: most people do not give their Facebook account sufficient time to learn before making changes, which can reset the entire learning process.
There’s always the possibility that even if you get the correct Facebook account setup, with adequate conversion volume to train the ad model, that competition in the ad auction will price you out of achieving the sales volume you need, at the ROAS level you desire. No Facebook advertiser can force people to buy a product or service that they perceive as inferior to another brand.
PR is important for warming up audiences across all performance marketing channels. The more you invest in great PR, the more you will lower your cost of lead or cost of new customer acquisition later as people’s trust, confidence and respect grows. You can warm up audiences without PR but it is then you encounter the Law of inefficient click-throughs.
Law of inefficient click-throughs means paid media doesn’t scale at the same level of profitability, unless fame grows at a similar level.
Fixing Your Facebook ROAS
Companies hiring agencies to fix Facebook ROAS back to the way it used to be will continue to be disappointed. Why? Because how Facebook creates the number in the ROAS column has fundamentally changed, and it no longer communicates the value of your investment the way you think it does.
Senior management in a company think of Facebook ROAS as the absolute north star of truth when it comes to measuring Facebook ad profitability. Why? Because agencies and ad managers haven’t shown them HOW BROKEN IT IS and A BETTER WAY TO MEASURE PROFIT. Again, old habits are hard to break and all that.
Let’s not forget that Facebook has been proven to have overreported on ad metrics for many years. The shock of having to guess ROAS using new ad models that guesstimate missing iOS data makes it more challenging for Facebook to inflate the numbers without risk or making their entire ad platform look completely unreliable. And losing advertisers is bad for business.
The Truth (About ROAS) Is Out There
Next week we’re going hunting for the truth. The truth about how to fix Facebook ROAS (return on ad spend). It’s going to be a mystery for Mulder and Scully to solve!
News
Ayrshire: Ayrshire Northern Lights: Aurora Borealis over Dunure - LINK
Glasgow: Retailers say Sauchiehall Street is 'beyond saving' - LINK
Edinburgh: Royal Bank of Scotland is rolling out new “green loans” - LINK
Aberdeen: Moray drams deliver bumper sales for French drink giant Pernod Ricard - LINK
Dundee: PechaKucha OutFest! event announced for Feb 23, 2022 - LINK
Scotland: Financial support for businesses outlined ‘to bridge resilience to recovery’ - LINK
Ethics: UK Parliament’s Digital, Culture Media and Sport Select Committee is conducting an inquiry into ‘Influencer culture’ on social media. - LINK
Legal Nerds: GDPR enforcer rules that IAB Europe’s consent popups are unlawful - LINK
Education: Mark Ritson’s Mini MBA in Marketing course is open for registration [12 April 2022 start] - LINK
Money: Blair Enns shares advice on how to pre-empt payment issues in the service industry - LINK
Mental Health: Aubrey Hirsch on harassment and existing as a woman online [Content Advisory] - LINK
PPC Geekery: Google finally launches revamped Partners program. New badges! - LINK
PPC Geekery #2: Google ads’ RSA vs ETA Optimisation case study - LINK
SEO Geekery: Google Search Console URL Inspection API launches, a new way for developers & SEOs to debug and optimise pages - LINK
Social Trends: 14 of the Most Important TikTok Trends to Watch in 2022 - LINK
And Finally…
Social media experts you can trust are in short supply. Thankfully thought leader Chris Messina understands what’s going on with Facebook. He really gets it.
In fact, in the space of one Twitter audio chat last week, I heard so much insight during his chat with Matt Navarra I felt compelled to immediately sign up to Chris’ newsletter. Then found myself pondering his ideas throughout the week.
You need to hear this! 👇
If you visit this tweet and click on the ‘Now Playing’ button, you can listen back to the conversation. Marketers can tune in to Matt’s weekly audio chats on Friday afternoons UK-time.
If fixing your Facebook strategy is on your to-do list, feel free to give us a call on 01292 844899. Or if you’re in a hurry, email claire@bigponddigital.co.uk and let’s set up a call to chat.
Until next time - good luck!
Andrew @ Big Pond
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