Facebook vs industry platforms: which one is best for your event business?
As published on www.eventerprise.com/blog:
As a small business owner, your time and money are valuable commodities that you cannot afford to waste. So, when it comes to building a robust digital presence, it is imperative that you do your homework and equip yourself with the most relevant information available. The problem, of course, is that in an ever-changing digital environment the most pertinent information can differ from day to day. Take Facebook for example. Up until mid-2017, Facebook was one of the most potent free digital advertising tools in the world, but because of changes to the site in recent months, it’s no longer a viable option for small business owners.
To understand why Facebook is no longer your best option, let’s first take a look at a brief history of advertising on the site.
When Facebook first launched there weren’t many advertising options on the social network, and its user base consisted entirely of university students. Facebook presented digital marketers with an interesting duality; on the one hand its advertising options were neither versatile or good looking, but on the other hand, it allowed marketers to target university students specifically. In the end, the power of targeted advertising won and Facebook earned over US$380 000 in advertising revenue in its first year.
The first Facebook ads were standardised banner ads – source: Mashable
It wasn’t long before Facebook changed its membership policies and allowed anyone, from anywhere in the world to create a profile. That, with the addition of the news feed in 2006 was the catalyst that started driving a range of businesses, from home-based wedding bakers to large corporations, to create a Facebook presence. The appeal of the news feed was that a business owner was able to directly communicate with their target audience for free (organically). It’s important to note that the idea of a continuously refreshing news feed was still relatively new at the time, with Twitter having launched only a few months earlier. The concept of the news feed was still novel, and there’s nothing quite as enticing to a digital marketer as an environment with a large audience which is both novel and free to use.
The golden age of organic advertising
In 2007 Facebook launched Pages which completely altered the way that businesses were able to advertise on the social network. Pages not only gave businesses a clear way to display their information, but they also included Facebook insights, and the ability to target specific interest groups when posting. With Facebook insights businesses gained the ability to track the reach and engagement of every post, which meant that they could fine-tune posts to ensure that they reached as many people as possible. The ability to target posts meant that users would see posts that interested them; in other words, a vegan would almost never see posts from a butcher’s shop. And thus began the golden age of organic advertising on Facebook.
An overview of Facebook Insights in 2018. Source: Social Media Examiner
Managing a Facebook page was so easy that even people who were not digitally savvy could become reasonably proficient social media managers. All that was required was a halfway decent internet connection, a few good looking pictures, and some time. Facebook continued to tweak the user experience of the site and by the end of the third quarter of 2008 Facebook had reached over 100 million users, and in 2009 the Facebook user base surpassed MySpace for the first time. By this point, if a business did not have a well managed Facebook page, it was leaving money on the table.
As the Facebook user base grew, Facebook started refining their onsite advertising methodologies, and it wasn’t long before featured posts were added to pages. In a nutshell, a featured post allowed businesses to post an ad in the form of a status update, which would be displayed in a user’s news feed. Initially, users would see all the featured posts of pages that they or their friends and family had engaged with. The problem with this was that users were beginning to feel as though their news feeds were becoming filled with spam.
Source: Tabsite
Facebook’s solution was to add an easy way for people to unfollow friends and pages they liked, without actually unliking them. So, if your mom made a Facebook page for her cat, you could “like” the page, immediately “unfollow” it, and then never see any of its status updates or featured posts. And the best part was that your mom would never know that you unfollowed her page since you were still a “fan” of the page. It was at this point that organic reach started to see a significant drop, and Facebook’s pay-to-play strategy started coming into play.
Pay-to-Play
To digital marketers and small business owners, Facebook advertising is like a mobile game. You start off free, and if you spend every waking moment of your life playing the game, you might do well. But, if you want to stack the odds in your favour, you can boost your chances with just a few dollars. Of course, the more you spend, the better your chances of success are, which is why some companies spend in excess of US$100 000 on Facebook advertising.
Despite the fact that Facebook offers many of its services for free, it is a for-profit company which relies heavily on ad-generated revenue. To generate more revenue, Facebook uses a few subtle tricks to “encourage” businesses to pay for advertising. One of the most insidious practices that Facebook uses is to decrease the reach of pages with large followings. In 2017, if your page had fewer than 10 000 fans, your average organic reach was about 8% of your total fan base. If however, your page had 100 000 fans, your total organic reach was less than 2%. If you take a look at Facebook’s advertising revenue, it becomes clear as to how effective its pay-to-play strategy has become.
Year-over-year growth in Facebook advertising revenue. Source: Statista
Facebook disguised this practice as part of its “EdgeRank” algorithm. EdgeRank is the system that Facebook uses to give every post a score, with high scoring posts appearing first on a user’s timeline. A post’s EdgeRank is determined by numerous factors ranging from how old the post is, to how similar it is to other posts you’ve interacted with.
From a user perspective, EdgeRank makes your news feed far more manageable. If you log into your Facebook account once a day, you will see an average of about 300 new stories in your news feed. Without Facebook’s EdgeRank system you would see over 1500 stories every hour. This would make the news feed so unusable that most people would abandon the site. Like so many of Facebook’s advancements, EdgeRank improves the site for the average user, but in turn, makes the site a much more competitive environment for organic marketing.
In order to stay competitive, social media managers started to spend more time working on their Facebook pages. According to the 2017 Social Media Marketing Industry Report published by Social Media Examiner, 41% of digital marketers spent an average of 11 hours a week working on their Facebook page.
The end of organic
Organic reach on Facebook has been on the decline for a few years now. To combat declining organic reach, marketers and businesses started getting more creative with their social posts. As time went on and organic reach kept diminishing, marketers who were worth their salt went from a spray-and-pray approach to a more refined strategy that relied on increasing the engagement of every post. That is why so many Facebook competitions you come across will ask you to like, comment, and share the competition post as part of the entry requirements.
Then, when social media managers thought that things couldn’t get more stringent, Facebook announced its list of “News Feed Values” which would decrease the percentage of business posts that users saw in their news feed. With the new news feed values in place, posts from your friends and family would get a higher EdgeRank, and thus more circulation, than posts from publishers or businesses.
“Agencies believe brands will have to spend more on paid ads on Facebook in order to get the same number of views — further lining Facebook’s pockets. This is just the “final nail in the existing coffin” of organic reach, said Doug Baker, director of strategic services at the agency AnalogFolk. [sic] Source: Digiday
In simple terms, Facebook went back to its core value proposition; being a social platform where friends and family could connect with each other and keep in touch. And for users these changes have been brilliant. Your news feed is once again being filled with stories about your sister’s German Shepherd puppy or your best friend’s fishing trip in Australia.
Loss of trust
Another element that has plagued social media managers and marketers is that Facebook users have started to lose trust in what they see in their news feeds. The site has been the centre of numerous controversies since it launched; ranging from lawsuits alleging that Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from ConnectU to privacy concerns about Facebook Beacon collecting private information with no way for a user to opt-out. Although these controversies got people talking and made news headlines, they weren’t severe enough for users to lose faith in the site.
However, the most recent controversy to rock the social media giant has led many users to lose complete faith in Facebook. It revolves around the fact that the data of up to 87 million peoplewere improperly shared with the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica. It has been alleged that Russian political campaign managers then used that information to influence the 2016 American presidential election, which ultimately led to Donald Trump being elected as POTUS.
In a bid to restore some trust, Facebook started clamping down on what it considered to be fake news and clickbait. The site was able to track these low-value posts by monitoring a users activities outside of the site’s ecosystem. Have you clicked on a link, then immediately gone back to Facebook? By doing that you told Facebook that the article or page you ended up on was complete drivel. If a few people did that for the same link, then Facebook would decrease the post’s EdgeRank, and fewer people would see it in the future. As Facebook refined its Quality Program, its algorithms became sophisticated enough to start identifying clickbait and fake news from the titles of posts alone. And while we should all celebrate decreased clickbait in our news feed, there are far-reaching ramifications for small businesses.
The problem with clickbait headings is that they work well and drive traffic. While the clickbait practice has not been embraced across the board, and many writers have slated the misleading nature of clickbait, clickbait titles are still one of the easiest ways to entice engagement. Sure, it’s easy enough to think that the simple solution would be not to write clickbait titles, but, that’s only an effective solution if you know that Facebook has changed its algorithm. Considering that most small business owners are busy running their businesses, it can be hard for them to have all the up-to-date information.
The true cost of Facebook
“But, Facebook’s free! I’ve got nothing to lose right?” Well, not exactly. Even if you never spend money advertising on the site, there is still a cost involved.
At the beginning of 2017, the average recommended Facebook budget for a small business was ~US$1 per day with an additional US$1 per 100 visitors to your website. So, if you had a small event catering business that got an average of 1000 visitors to your site a month, you would spend about US$40 per month. With that budget, and spending a minimum of an hour a day working on your organic posts, you could build a decent local profile for your business. However, if your company was in a competitive market, you could reasonably expect to double your monthly budget.
After all the recent changes, you will need to spend more time and money on your Facebook page to achieve similar results to what you were getting last year. Right off the bat, you will need to double your once small budget of US$40 a month and push that hour to about two hours a day. The problem, of course, is that if you are unfamiliar with the complexities of paid advertising, or you don’t know what the significance of impressions vs CTR is, you could waste a lot of your time and money trying to figure it out. To avoid squandering your time and money you could take a social media management short course, which while free, will take you at least a month to complete. And even then, you will only have a rudimentary understanding of how to manage paid campaigns.
Additionally, when looking at the true cost of anything, it is essential to look at more than the dollar outlay. After all, your time is worth money. Freelance social media managers can cost anything from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per month, depending on your campaign. So, if you run your own campaigns, you should price your time at a similar rate. Let’s say you spend two hours a day working on an outreach campaign, and your ad budget is US$80, your total cost would start at around US$380 per month.
What alternatives are you left with?
In today’s digital world, a robust digital presence is still one of the most vital components for the success of your business. The proliferation of cheap smartphones and affordable data has made Google a part of the everyday life of most people. In essence, if someone cannot find you after a quick Google search, you may as well not exist.
Usually, digital marketers would tell you that you need a well-built website which is continuously updated with new, industry-relevant content. And to an extent, they’re not wrong; assuming you have either the time or the money to run a website efficiently. At this point, it’s good to point out that almost every high ranking site in the world has a team of experienced developers, content producers, and digital marketers behind its success. If that sounds too expensive, a free website builder might seem like an enticing and cheap option, but in reality, free website builders are costing your business valuable digital exposure.
One of the last remaining bastions of affordable and effective digital marketing is an industry-specific third-party platform. Think about it, if you’re travelling to Boston for the first time and you’re looking for somewhere to stay, what is your first step? Would you first check Facebook, or would you go to a site like TripAdvisor? If you Google “accommodation Boston USA” almost every result on the first page links to a travel-related platform, and there are no links to the websites of places to stay.
That is because platforms like TripAdvisor and Airbnb hire some of the most exceptional digital marketing talent in the world to ensure that the small businesses who they represent are findable. By having your business listed on an industry-specific platform, you never need to worry about things like SEO, EdgeRank, content creation, or programmatic marketing. All you need to do is create your profile, and let the experts in their field do the rest. This will mean that you have more time to do what you do best – run your business.
If you’re tired of wasting your time and money on fruitless digital marketing efforts, then claim your free-for-life Eventerprofile and gain first-hand experience with how invaluable an industry-specific platform can be.
By Warwick Levey | April 11th, 2018 | Categories: Sales & Marketing | Tags: events platform, Facebook, industry platform, social media, technology, website