Well, another milestone was reached by Mr. Zuckerburg, 20 million small businesses are using Facebook pages according to COO Sheryl Sandberg in the Q3 earnings report. But are small businesses using the Facebook advertising programs? Probably not as much as they hoped.
One issue that could be the problem in this, is that business owners are not as savvy in “buying” advertising as we think. In Facebook, you have an option to run the length of the campaign on a set budget, Cost per Click (CPC) or Cost per Thousand (CPT). These are terms (CPP, CPT) in the advertising world we use when we deal with advertising agencies, or clients looking to keep similar reporting metrics to analyze apples to apples. Without some sort of insightful training, small business owners are like deer in headlights.
Additionally, when business owners make a post, do they “boost” that post for a couple bucks? The next post? And when is the best time to post a special, comment, offer that it will receive maximum exposure. I have been asked by many small business owners how to operate their Facebook. I have given advice, ran Facebook pages, and even executed ideas/offers. But what is apparent to me is that the value of the advertising on Facebook for small business owners hasn’t been explained well enough. The idea of small business owners is that using your Facebook page to post is good enough, but it isn’t good enough. As I write this, a Facebook post in my newsfeed ironically talks about Facebook for business. “8 ways to reach people near your business” https://www.facebook.com/facebookforbusiness/a/reach-local?campaign_id=422879767813353&placement=ads
Here are a couple links for small business owners:
https://www.facebook.com/facebookforbusiness/
https://www.facebook.com/facebookforbusiness/goals
https://www.facebook.com/facebookforbusiness/basics
Taking it one step further, a new push for accountability might threaten online and digital advertising. As more and more dollars pour into online/digital advertising, advertisers need justification to their bosses that the dollars spent are relevant and cost effective. You see the billions of dollars that are going into advertising on Facebook, Twitter, etc, but what advertisers are clamoring for now is answers to questions like: How do we know our ad we seen? Are the click-through’s to our website click fraud? How do we measure effectiveness?
More and more consumers are using ad blockers (9-23% est.) and is growing 43% a year which begs the question. What if the consumer was receptive to the advertising but use an ad blocker application? This presents a problem to the value of digital advertising because media buyers know that their campaigns purchased will not reach their goals set forth.
My recommendation to any small business owner, find a training program that will teach you the insides and outs of Facebook and other Social Media programs. There is one place called Social Media Marketing University (www.socialmediamarketinguniversity.com) that helps bring business owners up to date with the new and relevant information. The website, Social Media Examiner http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/ also has many forums, articles and ideas for business owners to make their page more engaging as well.
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darrelldahlberg 