Why we still use Facebook
Panic Attacks!
Most days, I wake up wishing I wasn’t focused on Facebook marketing. I have had at least 6 panic attacks since I opened up my business at the end of 2018. Whenever I discuss Facebook as a business marketing avenue to prospective clients there is about a 90% chance that the business will react negatively. The thing that makes me least happy about my job is Facebook. You may ask yourself, as I have many times, why are you still marketing on Facebook?
Why Facebook?
The easy answer could be that it is one of the biggest marketing channels for a business to be on, but with other channels on the rise like Tick Tock, we could also pivot. It could also be said that this is the platform our business has the most experience in, which does help push the needle in the direction of keeping Facebook as a platform we service, but not the main two reasons we are on the platform. We market on the Facebook platform because of community and the ads platform.
Leveraging Community
Businesses who leverage the strategy of building a community on social media always win. Building community has been done in so many ways, and with so many different intentions, but when done right, it not only brings a warm feeling to the heart of these marketer at Empowered Social Media, it also increases interaction, overall engagement, and separates the businesses we work with from their competition. It is also exciting to see how community can be built by sharing old memories, creating new ideas as a group, and reaching out to someone for the first time that you want to partner with in the future. All of that can be done on Facebook.
Ads Platform makes all the difference
Facebook has the strongest ads platform that we have experience, meaning that it has a ton of options, analytics, and bang for the buck. If you have never used the platform before, or are even in the first year of using this platform, it is super intimidating. Just to be clear I am talking about the level beyond boosting. All too many marketers have taken the Facebook bait when it tells them that a post is performing 90% better than the other posts and gives them an easy way to turn it into an ad. The problem is the average business owner or marketer doesn’t have enough information to create an informed goal for the ad that translates into an outcome positively impacting the business. So, when the ad is done and it tells them they paid 24 cents per engagement, but nobody knows what to do with that information.
I am not trying to deter people from using the platform, just trying to inform people what is really happening to most businesses when they dabble in ads. The platform is so robust that marketers, managers, and owners fall into a trap of spending money on social, not seeing tangible results, and thinking it just doesn’t work for them. In business school, my teachers and countless text books asked me to figure out the same impossible question “who is my audience?”. I always said in response, in my head, “how the hell do I know? That’s why I am taking this class so you can help me find out.” Spoiler alert: They never tell you, so you have to do the dirty work. This is where ads comes into play.
Dynamic Creative (Testing)
Through the platform, a brand can create an ad that has multiple pictures, headlines, and copy to an audience in their area that has either interacted with their content before through visiting their website, engaging with their content, being on an email list, and watching a certain amount of their videos, or through interests, age, and geo-location that make sense for the business.
Detailed Targeting
When I do interest targeting to people who have never interacted with this business, key words like marketers, social media examiner, social media marketing, solopreneurs and content marketing help me to find people who could be my target audience. This gives marketers the opportunity to know what content their engaged or new audiences love the most and then create a lookalike (copycat) audience with similar characteristics to those people, so they can find more of them. Through Facebook ads you are able to test, learn, adjust and optimize your content to learn about your audience. I know, sad, but it is time to end this thing.
By the time you read this, Facebook has probably already made another questionable decision that has probably given me and my business a 7th or 8th panic attack. As long as we can create community, connect people to other people who have similar values, bring positively, gratitude, and compassion to people’s lives, and connect people to brands who will improve their well-being, we will be on Facebook. The truth is that people are still looking for brands, wanting to create more connections, spending more time than ever, and buying products through Facebook.
