As a digital marketer, I’m reading far too many articles taking jabs at the Facebook advertising platform. The argument runs that because the ads you see against your profile are sometimes irrelevant, Facebook’s business model is flawed. Most of the articles of this ilk focus on this being Facebook’s problem, with this being a product-related issue. From a user and business perspective, this is simply not true.
No, I didn’t receive an email from Princess Zuckerberg asking me to save her family fortune from the hands of the rebel forces. This is not the typical Nigerian 419 scam. In this version, Facebook is unknowingly misleading its advertisers about its vaunted targeting abilities. If you buy ads targeting the U.S., it is now very likely that you are getting traffic from Nigeria and other parts of Africa, as well.
Recently, eMarketer announced that mobile Facebook advertising now receives more mobile display advertising dollars than any other network or platform, including major players like Google. Here are five ways to master mobile advertising on Facebook if you’re late to the game.
Remember the kindergarten game, “Show and Tell?” Based on its more mobile-friendly News Feed redesign, it appears that Facebook will now be more show than tell — or, to be more precise, it will be burying the tell in billions of pictures. The shift to a “personal newspaper” format with larger and more prominent photo displays is a response to photo-driven behavior that has rapidly changed the social media landscape. Facebook Co-Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg says 50 percent of all posts are now pictures, double the amount from just one year ago.
In February, the business, tech, and social media industries were abuzz with the results of a study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, during which it was revealed that in America, “droves of users” were taking breaks from Facebook. In the days that followed, the headlines worried about the fact that 27 percent of people were planning on taking a break from the world’s largest and supposedly most popular networking site.
Wondering how to optimize your Facebook advertising campaigns for business-to-business? We’ve broken down the process into eight essential steps.
We’ve been having this debate internally for some time, but Toby Margetts’ recent post on “Why You Are Measuring Facebook Engagement Inaccurately” has prompted us to get the pen out to reveal our latest thoughts on Facebook engagement.
The redesigned News Feed Facebook announced Thursday is a beautiful, visually rich design with some borrowed elements from mobile user experience that helps create a smooth, clean experience. But you already read all about it. In an ideal world, a richer and more engaging News Feed is good news for brands, which can benefit from higher engagement on their already mostly visual posts. But there is always a “but.”
The recent real-time marketing coup by Oreo and its agency, 360i, during the Super Bowl blackout has had people talking about the next wave of social media marketing and advertising. And while that singular image of a delicious cookie, accompanied by a hyper-timely message, may serve as inspiration for other companies looking to evolve their own digital marketing initiatives, the reality is that few companies will ever be able to do what Oreo did. They simply lack the creative and human resources to be “always on” — producing real-time, inspired, first-party branded content to delight their fans. Most companies have very small teams responsible for social media marketing, and, in many cases, just one or two people responsible for developing the voices for their brands online.
Let’s keep it simple. There are five things you should be doing on your Facebook pages to help ensure that you grow your fan counts, engage your fan bases, and ensure that those fans see your posts in their Facebook news feeds.
