Earlier this week, Avinash Kaushik, who’s certainly among the most brilliant marketing minds of the generation, wrote an exceptional piece on Facebook Marketing. It’s a lengthy read, but a worthwhile one, and I urge anyone who reads this site and uses Facebook to reach an audience to spend 30 minutes to fully parse what he’s put together.
(from Avinash’s post)
Given that I enjoyed the piece and felt it made some excellent points, I wanted to try to summarize those here, and provide some takeaways and perspectives of my own.
Let’s start with the big lessons learned:
- Success (or failure) of a Given Campaign on Facebook Does Not Make the Platform Good (or Bad) – as Avinash wisely points out in his introduction, correlation is not causation, and hearing a great success story or a terrible failure shouldn’t swing your perspective. Facebook has undeniable reach, but the degree of value to marketers in the current state is debatable. Case studies don’t change that – testing, especially controlled tests, could be used to prove it.
_ - The Goal of Facebook Marketing and Advertising Differs from Many Other Platforms – rather than merely trying to drive visits from Facebook to your own site, the goal often focuses on growing your Facebook likes so that future messages have the opportunity to reach a larger audience. I might argue this is also true of Google+ and Twitter and of content marketing on one’s own site, too (e.g. this blog doesn’t link to SEOmoz’s products very often, but hopefully builds some brand value with readers, much like fans/followers of brands on social networks).
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As I read this section, I felt a bit of subtle disagreement, not with what Avinash said, but with how he framed it: “…since your original purpose was to create an owned engaged audience on Facebook, rather than primarily driving direct revenue via constantly “pimping of coupons, offers,” it should come as no shock to anyone that the conversion rates, revenue and bottom-line metrics from Facebook will be pretty small from the brand page efforts, from the Sponsored Stories, from the Promoted Posts. Because (sorry I’m repeating myself) that was not the point. Having a conversion business impact was not the point. And people who’ve tried to make it the primary point have failed miserably on Facebook.”
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I’m not sure that’s entirely right. Measuring the number of folks who interacted/engaged with your Facebook presence AND ALSO eventually converted is definitely a big part of the metrics that matter. I agree that direct traffic will rarely be a strong driver of business value, but at Moz, using even simplistic attribution modeling, we see that a lot of the marketers we reach through our presence on Facebook do visit our site, sign up for the Moz Top 10 email, become community members, and, yes, even convert to a free trial. Just not on the first visit and rarely directly from a Facebook referral.
_ - Traditional Ads are Possible on Facebook, and the New Facebook Offers Looks Interesting – there is an exception to the indirect formats of advertising noted above. Using the promoted stories/URLs, you can drive traffic directly to an off-Facebook, conversion-focused page. And, the new Facebook Offers allows for the potentially viral spread of a conversion-focused ad (you can share only with fans who already like your page, but their friends will automatically see the offer IF they use it).
_ - It’s Hard to Prove Value with Audience & Engagement Metrics, But Easy with Traffic & Conversion Ones – Correctly, Avinash notes that CxOs are less likely to be swayed by metrics like fan growth, wall posts, # of people who saw a post, likes, etc. and more likely to want to put money into an online marketing channel that produces traffic and conversions. Thus, convincing execs to put more money and effort into Facebook can be a slog.
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I might add some caveats here. SEO is one of those activities that generate exactly the metrics Avinash is talking about, yet despite having 4-5X the traffic driving ability of PPC, it’s probably going to get <1/5th the investment of PPC this year (Forrester estimates <$5B and ties in some other stuff vs. $20B+ for PPC). I’d argue the metrics are a part of it, but the simplicity and directness of the process matters a lot, too, and Facebook is good at this. Every CxO knows that their whole family is one Facebook and they know what wall posts are and what likes are. They have no clue (generally) about SEO metrics, how Google’s algorithm works, why people click what, keyword demand curves, etc. It wouldn’t surprise me if 4 years from now, there’s more being spent on Facebook marketing than SEO, even if SEO continues driving 5-10X the traffic and conversions Facebook can.
_ - There are Three Metrics that Matter for Social Networks; Facebook Doesn’t Highlight Them for You – The standard, top-level Facebook metrics on brand pages – Likes, Friends of Fans, People Talking About This, and Weekly Total Reach – are not what marketers should care about. The fact that Facebook puts those metrics front and center actually hurts their platform. Instead, Avinash urges use of 1. Conversation Rate: # of Audience Comments (or Replies) Per Post, 2. Amplification Rate: # of Shares Per Facebook Post, and 3. Applause Rate: # of Likes Per Facebook Post. Thankfully, these are all inside Facebook Insights. Sadly, they’re tough to extract.
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Avinash notes a tool – True Social Metrics – which he likes and uses. He goes on to say that getting post-level intelligence and detail matters, but requires some exporting and messing around. From my perspective, savvy marketers should view this as a good thing. Anything that’s tough to measure (but not impossible) will have few people taking full advantage of it, meaning less competition and greater ROI potential for those willing to put their nose to the grindstone and earn the data.
_ - Promoted Posts and Sponsored Stories Can Help You Reach Some People (but not others) – Facebook has two ways you can reach people who already like you or are friends with people who like you; promoted posts (which focuses on the former) and sponsored stories (which focuses on the latter). The metrics here are actually fairly straightforward – how many folks did you reach, what engagement did you receive, and how many new people now follow you. The problem is, you don’t really know what the ROI is on any of those actions, and unless you have excellent multi-touch attribution and possibly more sophistication than even that (tying Facebook accounts to signups on your site via something like FB connect), it’s not very trackable even in the long term. You could, however, run some controlled experiments to get an estimate of this value (but it’s not easy).
_ - Facebook’s Display Ads Have the Easiest Metrics/ROI to Track and Show – Because they operate like display ads on pretty much any other networks, you can put in a custom URL and track with relative ease & abandon. Just make sure to include unique URLs or URL parameters as Facebook doesn’t append tracking data for your analytics to consume otherwise.
_ - It’s Possible to Have Offline Impact w/ Facebook Ads (and even to measure it!) – Unfortunately, you’ll have to run controlled experiments and have excellent tracking infrastructure and segmentation to do it. Avinash’s post details an example of how and shows a relatively usable methodology, though it’s one of those things that makes me really glad Moz sells software over the web 🙂
_ - Remember to Make Your Products and Services So Amazing that People Can’t Help But Talk About Them on Facebook – good advice for every inbound channel. It’s really hard to earn traffic, awareness, and attention (vs. buy it) when what you do isn’t worthy of earned media.
_ - Social Media Can Amplify Success; It Cannot Create It – I couldn’t agree more. Though, I might go one step further. Social media marketing, like SEO, or content marketing, or community building, or any form of marketing, cannot create a great business, but it can help a good product become a market leader over a better product that ignores these channels.
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When Avinash writes, I read. When he says “use these metrics,” I try to find a way to put them into Moz’s product roadmap.
In this post, I think he does a really good job of highlighting some of the strengths and weaknesses in Facebook’s platform. I hope some Facebook folks read this and think about ways to align the incredible power their platform can provide with what marketers need to measure ROI. I know they don’t care as much about revenue as they do about user experience, but in this case, I think some alignment toward what Avinash blogged about could help both.