Admittedly this has not been a good year and a half for Facebook.

There was its unfortunate culpable influence on the 2016 election through fake news posts and the tendency of its users to believe and share anything in their echo chamber (perhaps while hurling snarky insults at those outside said chamber). Then there was the fake followers scandal, where businesses discovered that many of the real followers they thought had maybe came from the place in China where they produce farm-raised fish. If that wasn’t enough, then came the revelation that Cambridge Analytica mined the profiles of 68 million users and their friends (without user permission) for political-targeted behavioral marketing. But wait, there’s more! After that came the revelations that Facebook shared user data and friend profiles without their consent to hardware manufacturers, including a Chinese company that was on a US espionage watch list.

Whew. That sure has Mark Zuckerberg’s makeup artists working hard before each public appearance.

So many of my clients ask me, should I be active on Facebook, market on Facebook, even be on Facebook? To answer that question we have to go back to a place before all the sensational headlines and examine the premise of trying to market on Facebook itself.

The Ideas Behind Marketing on Facebook

 

The two basic premises for marketing on Facebook was that you can get a lot of traction for free and everyone is there. Well Facebook took care of the first premise by making it harder and harder to get into people’s feeds so you now have to pay for it. As for the second premise, just because tens of thousands of people are in the park for a Fourth of July fireworks display, is that a good time to go out and try to sell them life insurance? They may be there, but they’re not there to buy anything in particular, the reason to be there is to have fun. So is it an audience, sure, but a receptive one? That’s another thing entirely.

Targeted Marketing on Facebook

 

So pivoting back to the top of this piece, what about paying to advertise to selected user profiles al la Cambridge Analytica above? Well behind all the hysteria of the breach of privacy is the fact that there is little evidence that Cambridge Analytica’s tactics actually worked. The reason? The whole flaw about drawing inferences between who your friends are, what you like and what you click on is that it is inferred. You may not have the same tastes as your friends and you may no longer be in the market for what you clicked on. Or what you Liked may not predict your buying behavior (or voting behavior for that matter).

Profiling and clustering based on where you live, what you buy and other lifestyle characteristics have been around long before social media or even the Web itself and it has not had a solid track record of response. Evidenced behavior (search marketing) or demographics based on hard data (income, age, home value) has always been the better bet.

So my advice? If you are the kind of business where people want to share and talk about what have to offer, sure, have a Facebook presence and carefully maintain it. But the idea of that being the primary marketing channel and driver of your business? Well that certainly would be fake news.

Learn more about how we can help you with your social marketing efforts here.