Facebook uses the success of Nike's World Cup campaign as an example of its effectiveness to promote entertainment. But if Nike’s World Cup campaign did receive high response, raising the average presumably, that means everything else receives in even lower response rates than the already low reported average in this article in Businessweek.
. . . the average ad is clicked on by less than a tenth of a percent of the site's users, according to advertisers and analysts, including Greg Sterling, a San Francisco-based Internet marketing consultant.
Big brands are showing up because Facebook is popular among the hard-to-reach and appeal-to 18-34 year olds. Not because they think it is an effective medium. Some do it to draw their smaller competitors’ dollars into an ineffective medium. Remember these companies are not about sharing knowledge with others for the benefit of mankind.
Facebook may be a place where already popular entertainment properties, like the World Cup, can successfully engage the audience to participate. Facebook is a very personal and “me-centric” social media. So the networking is among friends or friends of friends. To be even more accurate – they are really lost friends, distant relatives, and acquaintances with whom one doesn’t already regular talk to. It makes sense that already popular entertainment are common “shares” since this is something one expects to receive positive receptivity for from people one doesn’t know very well nor have anything in common with from a vocational or avocational point of view.
There are alternatives for the rest of us - not yet popular entertainment or small to medium business.
Twitter is a better source to find individuals who aren’t just waiting for the next “popular“ thing to come along. They have interests, expectations, and knowledge through experience which move them more than popularity. Anyone who takes the time to build a list of Twitter accounts to follow - consistent with a category other than mass popularity – is actively sharing information by whom they follow. They are the most active in a community, potentially highly influential, and are publicizing their specific needs and interests. They are there to network with prospects (not friends) so they will respond.
Twitter is free, but analyzing twitter accounts to build a list of prospects is very time-consuming. Use keywords in Twitter Search to find interested twitter accounts, look at whom they follow. You can organize them in a public or private list (without following them), and then watch the list to learn who may care the most about what you have to offer. Then follow those and when they follow you back send them a reply (not a direct message that no one else sees) with a personal message to start a conversation.
An alternative for small to medium business-to-business is LinkedIn. Anyone can search the database to find individuals who may hire or buy outside services. But to contact strangers requires a premium membership which permits a limited number of “In Mails”. Additionally, on Linked-In you can search and join groups, research the members and outreach with personally relevant messages through In Mail. If you don’t want to pay for the premium membership to send In-Mails, then use it to identify people to look for on Twitter.
Facebook appears to be less expensive than Google’s keyword bidding process, but Google’s self-reported average 10% response rate (also according the to BusinessWeek article referenced above) is a lot higher than Facebook’s less than a tenth of a percent. So spending money on Facebook is like buying a metal detector to find a gold coin in a garbage heap. Twitter is very time-consuming, but the minute someone figures out how to accelerate the process for a fee, it would probably be worth trying.
Comments