Coming off of a huge outage, a shorter secondary outage, a whistleblower, and massive amounts of false positive “strikes” on ad accounts – Facebook is losing some momentum.
Granted, they are still huge, money is still running transactions, and will continue to be a “key” element of many social media marketing strategies.
If you want more information, check out our YouTube episode that features it –
But does Facebook matter?
Absolutely not.
Here are the top 5 reasons, Facebook Doesn’t Matter:
1. Not Every Business Needs Facebook
A lot of industries do incredibly well without Facebook or Social media. Not every coffee drive-thru needs Facebook, not every lawyer needs Facebook, not every accountant needs Facebook, and not every Startup needs Facebook.
But,
- Every coffee drive-thru needs great coffee to succeed
- Lawyers need to create wins and value to clients to succeed
- Accountants need to create value and reduce anxiety to succeed
- Startups need genuinely good products and services to succeed.
Focusing yourself on your core business will improve your marketing more than anything else. It will generate the need for a tool like Facebook. But Facebook and social media should not be driving the business. If Facebook is your only platform, you are risking your entire business on a singular platform with outages, censorship, and poor customer service. Why risk your livelihood on that?
2. Not Everyone’s audience or customers exist on Facebook
This is a bit self-explanatory but does need to be said. Not everyone’s customers live in Facebook land – or if they do have a profile, they may not be actively using it or have the proper buying habits to be activated from Facebook.
Sometimes the audience is on Instagram, SnapChat, Blogs, Podcasts, etc.
Having a truly defined customer is key.
“But Adam, everyone is on Facebook and [insert name] says I should be there.”
Yet, your friend may not be an expert in your customers and your customers are not everyone.
3. If your ROI is higher in other efforts
If you have enough data to create reports to show effectiveness in your platforms, can you honestly say that Facebook is one of your best drivers of sales?
We actively do Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Youtube – but our best ROI is in Word of Mouth marketing. We use the platforms as tools to amplify our Word of Mouth and provide extra resources for it.
That is a strategy that works for our industry but not for everyone.
When we tie efforts into sales, we can begin to help people understand how to wisely steward their marketing budgets.
4. There Is No Strategy In Place
The number 1 secret to social media success is: Consistency.
The number 2 secret though is: Strategy.
Without either of those elements, it is nearly impossible to create genuine relationships with current and potential customers.
Having a strategy increases the potential effectiveness of your advertising, decreases content creation time, and creates a rallying point for your organization. When there is no strategy, then the business has a lack of communicated vision which will cause confusion internally and externally
5. Facebook’s Sub-ecosystems are more important
Statistics still show that time spent in Facebook is quite large, coming in at nearly an hour a day per user estimated.
But you might ask…. Where are they?
Your friends are not posting in their feeds nearly as much as they did a decade ago but they are still in the platform.
Facebook users are active in Messenger and Facebook Groups the most. These two sub-ecosystems within Facebook are the Bulletin Boards, Forums, and IRC Chatrooms of yesteryear.
If you are not investing in these places with your customers, you are actively missing the audience you intended all along.
People have pulled back from making their lives and content easily accessible because of public scrutiny. Even people you are not friends with can criticize your posts. While Facebook has said that it has curated your feed to things that you like, yet it has dismissed the posts from all of your friends that you might actually like.
This brings Groups and Messenger to center stage. Everyone still has the platform ready and accessible, but you are able to interact with like-minded people in Groups and carry on with deeper conversations in Messenger.
Granted, Snap Chat has become more of the group-chat hangout, Messenger has been extremely competitive and aggressive with their advertising. And Groups provide you with a “safe” place to post your real thoughts and feelings to a group of people who may judge you less or provide legitimate feedback.
So what is the alternative?
With Facebook’s outage, it revealed that many companies do not have a plan B for their marketing efforts. We fully recommend a holistic and strategic approach to your marketing that reduces risk and maximizes your ROI.
You should not rely on just one platform for all of your marketing.
If you would like help or have questions, fill out the form below or subscribe to our YouTube to learn more about Digital Marketing.
"*" indicates required fields
