I can certainly understand the author's frustration with Facebook advertising, and for what he's selling, it does make more sense to use Google than Facebook or Twitter.
I don't think that's an indictment of the site, though.
Facebook and Twitter are mediums for sharing and discussion. Traditional commerce feels a bit off, at best. If you want to use them to promote a business, you have to be participating in them on the same level.
I've used Facebook ads to promote a magazine and a podcast. In both cases, I saw much higher returns than with Google. I was asking people to come to the Facebook pages for the magazine and the podcast, and each page had a healthy amount of discussion and community because there was content for people to coalesce around. In our case, the ads did act as a primer for a more viral expansion, because there was something people could do and share on our pages.
I don't think Facebook is ever likely to become a good place for a 150-year-old B-to-B packaging service to do business. That shouldn't spell doom for the packaging service or for Facebook.
Also I think there is a big of a general problem with how people approach internet marketing and that is as a result of hype.
In the real world, there's a difference between promotion and advertising. You promote first and advertise once people know who you are. Then you run well-targetted advertisements aimed at the audience you want to reach. It's easy to forget that on the internet.
Often times people omit the low-cost promotional tools and run straight to the advertising. That's a big mistake in most cases.
I say:
1) Set up a Facebook page for your business
2) Learn to blog
3) When you are ready to try an ad campaign put a lot of legwork into it. Also look into site-specific advertisements for sites in related territory, etc.
Advertising is hard to get right. It always is. I would agree it's not an indictment against Facebook. It is an indictment of the hype of internet advertising though.
Promotion? Like posting an article about a trending topic on link farm thejournal.ie and hire a bunch of mturks to upvote on hackernews.
I like how they claim to have written the article before the facebook news (and only published after) -- and claim their business has been around longer than it has.
I suppose, like everything in life, there is no "one size fits all" solution to advertising. Just because FB works for someone, it doesn't mean it'll work for everyone else (same for Google, Twitter etc) and vice versa.
I wish there was a site, that had a list of online advertising success stories, and what strategies worked in each case. So if I am a 150 year old packaging business, I can simply look up businesses similar to mine, and see what kind of advertising worked for them. Of course, there is still no guarantee that it will work for me, but chances are a bit higher than blindly going to FB.
This would be great but is, unfortunately, naive. These are exactly the kind of learnings that businesses benefit from by keeping private.
Sharing these tips with your competitors, especially in a scenario like this where you'd literally drive up the prices of your own ads, doesn't make much sense.
Just because FB works for someone, it doesn't mean it'll work for everyone else
To me, the question right now is whether Facebook works for anyone.
I'm genuinely interested, because I've seen media-reported stories of many different kinds and sizes of organisations experimenting with advertising with Facebook, and I honestly can't recall a single one that had a happy ending. I realise that, as they say, the plural of anecdote is not data, but anecdotes can certainly suggest a pattern worth investigating.
Only problem is that sites like google that use a bidding system for ad placement - those small businesses don't want your competition there raising the CPM prices. So they may not be likely to share the places where they have a good ad return!
"Facebook and Twitter are mediums for sharing and discussion" I quit Facebook because it was a horrible place to have a discussion, people are conservative/not as honest when they have the eyes of that many people on them.
I don't think that's an indictment of the site, though.
Facebook and Twitter are mediums for sharing and discussion. Traditional commerce feels a bit off, at best. If you want to use them to promote a business, you have to be participating in them on the same level.
I've used Facebook ads to promote a magazine and a podcast. In both cases, I saw much higher returns than with Google. I was asking people to come to the Facebook pages for the magazine and the podcast, and each page had a healthy amount of discussion and community because there was content for people to coalesce around. In our case, the ads did act as a primer for a more viral expansion, because there was something people could do and share on our pages.
I don't think Facebook is ever likely to become a good place for a 150-year-old B-to-B packaging service to do business. That shouldn't spell doom for the packaging service or for Facebook.