Tag Archives: Advertising

Facebook Pages: No one is talking about you!

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About 3 – 4 years back, Facebook Pages was a hot property. Till just some time back, every brand, every advertiser wanted as many “Likes” as possible. At peak of this trend, some brands even did press releases on reaching 1 Million Likes.

Here is some bad news for Social Media Agencies, Consultants and every concerned with Social Media, Facebook Pages as a product has reached end of its life cycle and is no more valuable for brands. Why do I say this?

Check the metrics for some of the most popular internet brands in India and also International brands.

As defined by Facebook, the ‘People talking about this’ includes – likes, comments, shares, answering a question, responding to a event and claiming a offer. The average ‘People Talking about This’ is drastically reduced to just about 2%.

Why is this happening –

  • Facebook has two current priorities – Improve (and retain) User Engagement & Grow Revenues.
  • In a attempt to retain user engagement, Facebook wants users to engage with each other (people to people) and not with applications or pages. 
  • To grow revenues, Facebook wants you to pay to reach its audience. If the natural viral factor is high, brands no longer have to pay Facebook.
  • More pointers on this in my earlier post, where I said Facebook is no longer a powerful distribution platform.

What this implies –

  • Most pages listed above are currently (probably) not advertising on FB. It effectively means that the natural engagement of a Facebook page is now at a average of 2%. 
  • If only 2% of your page audience is going to engage, the ‘viral factor’ that introduced new users to your page will be a minuscule number. 
  • If a brand has gathered Facebook Fans / Likes by doing advertisements for its pages, value of the money spent is $0 today.
  • In case you are running any advertisements to get Likes to your page, consider halting it.
  • The only way to reach your own audience (people who have liked you) is using advertising tools like ‘Boost Post’.

So why is it a dead product? If a Facebook page (as a product) that has over a million users connected to it, but generates only 2% engagement and possibly even less viral factor is as good as dead. As a transaction product (like ecommerce) the conversions from Facebook Page will be further down since your posts reach a smaller percentage of ‘your Facebook audience’.

Going forward if the audience that you are building through Facebook Page is never going to engage with your posts, it might be a better option for advertisers to consider simply running CPC advertisements to target the necessary demographic, take users to their website and engage them there (back to pre-social media days of Facebook).

If you are a start-up building products around Facebook Pages or anything that concerns with distribution through Facebook Pages or even through Facebook, take a hard look at the data / funnels.

Some exceptions above are Mashable, BuzzFeed and 9GAG. Why? Because they are in the content business (yes Mashable too, in my opinion its no more a social media site) and for the fact that they have exceptionally high engagement numbers is probably because they are the only ones doing content marketing right on Facebook!

For everyone else, no one really is talking about you on Facebook. Not unless you are paying for it!

API based Advertising. Maybe Google lost a Billion Dollar Opportunity…

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Google is undoubtedly the master in text based advertising with its Adwords platform (that continues to be the largest contributor to Google’s revenue). It relies on a two formats of text advertising – through Search (display relevant advertisements to users on search results page) and Content Sensing (display advertisements based on content on the page user is browsing).

With advent of Twitter / Facebook and similar such platforms, emerged another prominent format of text outside boundaries of Google’s prominence – ‘status messages’ or ‘short text content’ or even ‘short text messages’. This text format originates and is consumed as quickly as it is generated. Concise, one-to-all (FB / Twitter) or one-to-one (SMS or chat).

Twitter owes its success to its API. Back in 2008-09, while developers were building applications on top of its API, I read/heard many say – “APIs is the product distribution” or “APIs is product marketing”. However, no one said “API is the next Advertising” (in context of text based advertising).

Imagine this simple hack – post the ‘short text’ through API to Google. The service would intelligently interpret if the ‘short text’ has any intent-value and revert back with the most relevant advertisement which the developers can embed back in their application the way they want it as part of their core product experience. The API could have options for Geo / Context, etc.

Is the opportunity huge? Its massive! Facebook is already under-fire for not having enough on its monetization plate. FB is monetizing via demographic targeting, while millions of status messages with a intent-opportunity go without monetization everyday. Twitter faces similar challenges, wrote about this earlier. Instagram, for example – you see this amazing photograph of a Pizza, you immediately want to eat one – show a relevant advertisement. Or two people on a IM like Whatsapp – making plans of a vacation to Canary Islands. This list goes endless.

There has been a radical shift in Internet (read content) over last 10 years, but web-monetization still continues to be same old method – either search or display. Companies involved in mobile advertising copy-pasted the web model to mobile. Web/mobile monetization models are ripe for disruption. While such kind of API based advertising requires a long-tail of advertisers, like the one Google has. But it will be difficult to under estimate startups who would want to get a slice off such very large opportunity; which otherwise will be Google’s lost opportunity….