Is it time to quit Facebook?

Before I begin I must stress that this piece in no way reflects the views of my employer nor any of its individual employees, this is my view and my view only.

I am mainly writing this post in response to Jon Loomer’s article entitled “It May Be Time for You to Quit Marketing on Facebook”. On the whole I agree with what he writes, I happen to follow his blog and in my own opinion he pretty much makes valid points on the majority of issues he writes about. However, I would also like to add my perspective as to why maybe we, those in our niche, should maybe think about closing the door on our Facebook marketing efforts.

Not long ago I wrote a post about Facebook marketers having to essentially drop all creativity and any hope of quality organic ROI’s in the pursuit of having to adjust to another algorithm change which essentially meant paying up for campaign exposure in the slight hope of some sort of return.

This of course wasn’t the end of the world for us ‘Facebookers’ as we had already become accustomed to its algorithmic twitches long before but this particular change did raise serious questions on how valuable the world’s biggest social media platform would become to SME’s in general and those serving particular niches.

No value?

In my personal opinion that has led me to conclude that Facebook has lost the majority of any value it may have had for us in our industry (gambling & igaming). I’m sure many share this view with me.

The funny thing is, it’s not so much the algorithmic changes which have led me to form this opinion, marketeers have always found ways to negate these challenges, moreover I’d argue that it is actually our audience, or ‘fans’ if you will that are demonstrating and providing evidence to backup my conclusion on a daily basis.

Social media is about people, communities and engagement – we know this of course, but does our audience understand this? Does it even have to?

Some would argue that it’s up to the marketeer to educate, inspire and enlighten the audience to participate more but I’m a firm believer that you can take a horse to water but fail when it comes to making it drink, I’ve tried. Basically, even if our audience understood the above it certainly doesn’t have to act upon it. Again some may say my attitude on this issue is defeatist, negative even, but I suspect those that do have the luxury of a product or niche either bathed in cash and/or free from the shackles of certain taboos that our industry and it consumers endure.

Changes

Sure, as Jon makes clear, algorithmic changes have also played their part in obscuring our pages and posts from a large percentage of our audience (for obvious reasons which I go into in the post mentioned above) but is that the defining argument to all this in our case?

No, as I alluded to before our audience doesn’t really want to interact with us, we’d be kidding ourselves otherwise, our audience are mostly passive, waiting to fish out little bits of information or freebies that interest them that our other platforms, mailers and website(s) heavily publicise with the added value of getting more accurate metrics. If you, as a page manager or social media executive are happy with providing that level of interaction on Facebook, if you can call it that, then I guess you can call your relationship with the platform and your audience a success.

However, I would ask the question ‘how much time’ are you investing into shaping, creating, posting and ‘engaging’ with the platform to what amounts to a silent majority on a weekly basis? Could time be spent better else where? Again, i suspect so.

Speaking to the masses?

We’ve essentially become broadcasters rather than engagers and that’s not entirely all our fault. Part of the problem stems from the fact that maybe we feel as if we must be on Facebook? After all everybody seems to be on it and surely by not being on it we’ll fail to ensure, endorse and continue with our solid branding credentials. And anyway, our competitors are on Facebook so we have to be, right?

Now, I am not trying to talk myself out of a job but I’ve been working on our niche brand Facebook pages for almost a year, not an epic amount of time granted, but I’ve observed that a lot of brands in our industry seem to be on Facebook just for the sake of being on Facebook. Sure, I know a lot of people feel this way already and have done for some time but how many times have you read someone discussing it?

Lazy practice?

Essentially, is being on Facebook a good solid and continual marketing practice for our industry or is it just plan lazy on our part, do we lack the creativity and/or imagination to find alternative methods to reach out to people or are we happy, stuck even, with the current social status quo? I think it’s fair to say the answer is a little bit of everything.

Sure attitude plays a part too, I’ve heard quite a few people say at conferences ‘this is how social media has always been in our niche’ and that’s sad because I reckon they’ve been doing it wrong for a long time, in fact, I’m guessing that we’ve all been doing it wrong for a good while.

There seems to be more questions than answers to be frank but maybe we’re doing it wrong because we haven’t closed the door on Facebook completely, rather, we’ve left it ajar in the thinly veiled hope that one day our audience will want to talk to us. It’s quite scary thinking about stopping Facebooking for our brands altogether (is it?) but maybe we should slam the door shut for a while and see if any of our audience come a-knocking. Just a thought?

I’d very much like to hear your thoughts on the above. If you think it’s tosh let me know, if you agree in part or agree wholeheartedly I love to hear from you regardless in the comment section below.