Chapter 5: Recent Facebook Changes
Introduction
As we have already established, until only one year ago, Facebook was still a relatively exclusive closed community, one that was principally focused on college and high school students, particularly in the USA.
Over the course of the past year, Facebook has therefore been making some very dramatic changes to the way that it operates. Some of the changes have been popular whilst others have been less so, but the one thing that is beyond question is that all of the changes have substantively altered the way that the Facebook community works.
Several of the changes that Facebook have introduced have been unpopular with existing community members, and have consequently brought the ownership of the website into conflict with many of the more outspoken community members (of whom there are quite a significant number!)
What this has demonstrated is the fact that many Facebook members are very protective about their community, and do not like to feel that it is being ‘attacked’ even when the ones doing (what they see as) the attacking are the site owners!
You could compare this protective attitude to that of the apparent majority of the MySpace community, most of whom seem to care little for the quality or validity of either the site or the network itself.
Facebook members are, however, extremely defensive about what they believe to be 'their’ community, and it seems to matter little who is posing the perceived threat.
If you are planning on using Facebook as a moneymaking resource, it is extremely important that you understand from the outset that Facebook community members are different.
They do seem to have an ingrained belief that ‘their’ community is different and somehow better than others like MySpace.
And what this means for you as a marketer should not be underestimated. That is, given the apparently rebellious nature of most Facebook community members it seems unlikely that they will be particularly welcoming to anybody brandishing an overtly commercial message in their face.
There is also some evidence which we will return to later that would suggest that the majority of Facebook community members also have a fairly high opinion of their own self-worth, and that of their aspirations and principles.
No marketer who wants to make any kind of significant marketing impact within the Facebook community should choose to ignore any of these factors, as doing so will almost certainly doom your efforts to failure.
In other words, if you're planning to promote and sell through the Facebook social network community, you must try to understand the people that you will be dealing with if you want to give yourself any chance of success.
Up until a year ago, Facebook was effectively a private online members club, and the majority of members in that club were all folks who had enjoyed higher levels of education.
Thus, a significant percentage of Facebook members are still highly educated and highly critical individuals, endowed with both the ability and strength of character to question decisions that they do not necessarily agree with.
Whilst the numbers of new members joining Facebook on a daily basis is certainly changing this demographic, nevertheless, at this moment, your 'average' Facebook community member whom you might envision turning into a customer is not going to be the easiest or most straightforward person to deal with and sell to, as Mark Zuckerberg has already found out!
News & Mini-Feeds
Back in September of 2007, Facebook launched the first of many changes that they were making to their community site.
At this point, they launched the News and Mini-Feeds services, which they obviously believed would provide valuable new resources to community members.
Unfortunately, however, many members did not agree that these new services were valuable!
Hence, there were many new member groups that sprang up on the Facebook site, all of which were established to protest against these decisions.
So, what was it about the News and Mini-Feeds concept that did so much to anger the community members?
Part of the problem seems to be that, coming so relatively late into the social networking ‘mass movement’, Facebook appear to be trying to do too much, too quickly.
And they are doing this with a group of users who somehow feel that this is their community, a group who are, moreover, generally well educated and fiercely independent.
At the same time, Facebook have continued working on the basic premise that most of their members are using the community to network with people that they have already met (and perhaps lost touch with) or current real life friends.
Therefore, the guys behind Facebook seemed to assume that every community member would be happy for everything that they did within the community to be reported to their peers.
This is, unfortunately, just not the case.
This is where the BIG mistake lies, and this is the point that it is critical to understand as a marketer, as it is a lesson that could be very expensive for you to learn for yourself.
For example, the basic idea of the Mini-Feeds is that they provide a constant feed of latest news to each and every member’s profile homepage.
This feed is drawn from several sources, so that everything that anyone in any group that you are a member of does is reported on your profile page. And, in one way or another, this has managed to annoy just about every Facebook member.
Every time a member of your peer group does something within their own Facebook ‘space’, all members of all of their groups get told about it.
What do Facebook members think of this?
Many of them have hated it, asking, for example, that Facebook gets rid of:
‘those terrible Mini-Feeds in our profiles, because this... lets EVERYONE see every little thing we're doing, which is... for stalkers. Where did our privacy go?’
Similarly, Facebook claim that they will watch the information that is being fed in through the mini-feed to your profile page, and from that, they will figure out the kind of things that a member is interested in. Then, they will pull other ‘similar’ stories from the site and put those in your mini-feed as well.
A great idea, you may think, especially from a marketing point of view. Perhaps for example, this might present a way of beginning to present some form of promotional message to members via the mini-feeds.
Whilst in theory, that might work, in practice, it does not seem that likely. For example, from the same ‘protest group’ as the quote above, here is an idea of the general opinion of such information. Facebook
‘bombards us with information we don't want to know (and) makes Facebook about as ugly as MySpace.’
So, granted, finding a way of getting your message into a constant information feed that automatically ‘lands’ in peoples profile or on their homepage sounds like it could be the perfect ‘smart’ way of promoting within the Facebook community.
But, the truth is that Facebook just does not work that way, principally because the community members would never allow it to do so, and I
suspect that, unless you were very smart indeed, all it would get you would be a whole lot of complaints and trouble.
Banner Ads
As can be seen from the last screenshot, and the one below:
Facebook does offer the ability to place banner advertising in various locations on the site.
You may also note from the two examples shown that both for educational institutions, and, given the nature of the community, these are the banners that are very probably the most effective within the Facebook site.
This is because the average consumers in general suffer from a least some degree of 'Banner blindness'.
That is, most website viewers who are confronted with banner advertising tend to skip straight past it almost without noticing its existence.
This is a widely accepted phenomenon for all types of businesses who are nowadays advertising online, and would certainly not be limited to the Facebook site.
Nevertheless, given that we have already conclusively established that the average Facebook community member is likely to be somewhat anti-establishment and ‘feisty’, the chances of commercial banner advertising being successful on such a website would, I suggest, be almost zero.
It is this reason that only a handful of commercial banners appear on the Facebook community site, and that the vast majority that do appear
are for more community orientated organizations like universities and colleges.
Nevertheless, even universities and colleges must justify the money they spend on advertising, and, therefore, it is reasonable to assume that they must get some kind of return from their Facebook advertising efforts.
I would strongly suspect that they do not get many direct signups from such banner advertising (nor do they expect to either), but it would certainly help to establish their name and 'brand' awareness.
Given that statistically, there are still significant percentages of Facebook users who are high-school students, it clearly makes sense for colleges and universities to get their names in front of the students as often as possible.
Whilst this is unlikely to convince them to choose one university or college over another (has anybody ever chosen one university over another purely on the basis of advertising?) it does nevertheless help to create an overwhelmingly positive image for the educational institution in question.
You, however, are less concerned with image and far more concerned with sales. This kind of banner advertising on the Facebook site is unlikely to be particularly successful at the latter, and I would therefore suggest you leave it to the educational centers to whom such advertising seems to have some real value.
Pay Per Click Advertising
In November, 2007, Facebook launched what was claimed to be their answer to Google ‘AdWords’ Pay Per Click advertising program. Facebook call their advertising 'social ads’.
In case you are unfamiliar with the concept, Pay Per Click advertising (sometimes known as PPC) is nowadays a business model offered by many online advertising companies. There is little doubt however that Google AdWords is still the premier service in the market.
Before the advent of PPC advertising, traditional advertising whether online or off was all about eyeballs, and more specifically the number of them that you could encourage to look at your ad.
Thus it was that in most circumstances an advertiser’s only option was to pay for their advertisement to be shown either online, or offline via TV, in a magazine or journal, or even (heard) on a radio commercial.
And, no matter how many or how few people actually looked at your advertisement, you would still be charged exactly the same amount of money for it to 'run'.
Pay Per Click advertising, and more specifically the AdWords program, changed that picture for ever as far as online advertising was and is concerned.
With PPC advertising, you will only ever pay when a potential customer acts upon seeing your advert.
In many ways, it could be argued that AdWords gave strength back to the advertisers by enabling them to pay for only those advertisements that drew a response (in this case, a click on the advert that took the interested party through to a particular website).
AdWords, however, was even smarter than this may at first appear.
This was because all AdWords advertisements are created around keywords that the advertiser best felt represented the product or service that they were trying to promote or sell.
If, for example, an AdWords advertiser was looking to promote a dog training e-book, then they would advertise using the phrase 'dog training' in their ad headline.
The AdWords program would then pick up on this keyword laden headline, and make sure that that advert only appeared on websites that were dog focused.
Thus, the people who would visit the website where the ad appeared would be dog lovers. It therefore follows that these site visitors represent the perfect potential customer for the advertisers business.
Particularly in the early days, therefore, the AdWords advertising model was stunningly successful.
Not only was it the most targeted advertising available but it only cost a few pennies when someone clicked on an ad as well.
Hence, Pay Per Click was a huge success for Google (one of the principal reasons, in fact, that they are now so successful), and therefore many competing PPC businesses were spawned.
Now, Facebook have entered the market with their ‘Social Ads’ campaign.
So, let's next look at the new social ads advertising model, and consider what advantages or disadvantages it may have.
Chapter 6: Social Ads
The Social Graph
During the roll out of what Facebook call their 'F8 platform ' in November 2007, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggested that the changes represented a completely new way of advertising online through the introduction of ‘Social Ads’.
This, he suggested, was because the new advertising service would include advertisers in the community 'social graph' in a way that traditional advertising did not.
For example, look at the very simple diagram showing the relationship of four Facebook community members:
I am in one Facebook group with Mr. B, and another, different, group with Mr. D. The nature of the Facebook community means, therefore, that all of their information will be freely passed to me, and, similarly, my information will be passed back to both of them.
Mr. B. also receives similar information from Ms. C, and inevitably some of that information will then be passed on to me. From there, it is reasonable to assume that the information will reach Mr. D and so on and so forth.
This is a very simple example of the 'social graph' that Facebook see as being of fundamental importance to their 'F8 platform', which is effectively the latest version of the Facebook site and system.
And, what they are suggesting with the launch of ‘Social Ads’ is that both the advertiser and the person to whom they are advertising will be part of this same social network.
Thus it is that ‘Social Ads’ will be presented either as a part of a user’s News Feed in the form of sponsored content or alternatively integrated into the ad space that appears on the left hand side of the site.
Furthermore, the reason that these adverts are called ‘Social Ads’ in the first place is that instead of random advertiser messages appearing in your News Feed, for example, the way the software behind ‘Social Ads’ operates means that the ads that appear do so alongside related actions your friends have taken on the site.
Because they are presented in this particular way, the idea behind ‘Social Ads’ is that they will enable your business to become part of people’s daily conversations.
This is the reason why your advertising can appear either in the left hand Ad Space, where it will be visible to users as they browse Facebook to try to connect with their friends, or as a constituent part of the News Feed service, where it will be attached to and served in the context of relevant social stories.
So, what advantages do Facebook claim that they would have over other similar PPC advertising business models such as Google AdWords?
Firstly, Facebook claim that it is advantageous to all community members that both the members who are advertising, and the people who are being advertised to are all Facebook community people
Facebook are therefore suggesting that this fact should make the viewer of any advertising material far more open and amenable to the message that the advertising contains.
The second and far more critical factor about Facebook ‘Social Ads’ is that, whilst a service like AdWords can, for example, allow an advertisers to target a particular type of customer, ‘Social Ads’ are able to go considerably further.
These adverts allow you to target your potential customer far more accurately, by sex, political persuasion, age and other social factors, in addition to being targeted by geographical location as well.
The Detail
In order to arrive at the initial 'Social Ads' set-up screen, you need to scroll to the bottom of your initial Welcome screen and click ‘Advertising’.
This will bring you to the screen like this, where you click the big green 'Get Started’ tag:
:
This is the screen where you choose what it is that you want to advertise and where you want to take your ad viewer.
In this example, you can see that we have two options available. That is, you can either direct your advertising at a webpage that you have posted somewhere else on the internet, or you can create a new ‘Page’ on the Facebook site itself (‘pages’ is something we shall return to in the next section).
If you already have ‘Pages’ created on the Facebook site, then this box will offer you a third option which allows you to choose something like a Facebook page or an application page that you have already created.
Let's just say that in this example, you want to take anyone who clicks on an advert to an external website where your products or services are advertised.
So, you would fill in the URL, and click ‘Continue’.
This brings you to screen that looks something like this one, from where you can begin to understand how precisely you can attempt to demographically target your advertising.
For example, the initial default screen that will be seen is for the United States, from which you can immediately see that the total potential market is over 17,700,000 people strong. This is on the basis that your only limiting factor is that your preferred target customer should be aged 18 or over.
If, however, your product or service can sell to people of any age, then you can remove even this restriction, and your number of potential customers rises to 21,800,000.
This, of course, assumes that you or preferred target customer is a US resident.
If you are looking to sell your product or service elsewhere, then the numbers would be significantly different. For example, if you want to sell to over 18’s in Singapore:
then you can see that there are not quite so many potential buyers for whatever it is that you are selling.
Let us imagine that in this particular example, I am trying to promote my new website that teaches people how to play the drums from an online training course.
In this case, you would not necessarily want to demographically target your advertising as, this being a digital product that is available online, there is no need to unnecessarily limit your potential customer base.
But the drop-down 'location' box does not unfortunately offer the option of advertising on a truly global scale.
For this reason, you would logically choose the biggest market, which is obviously the USA.
You could possibly remove the age limit for a product such as this too, but in this example, I will leave it as it is purely for the purposes of illustration.
Thus, the only thing I would need to add to this first screen would be my keyword, which in this case is 'drum’ or 'drums'.
Inputting this keyword automatically reduces the size of the potential market shown in the top right-hand corner of the screen to 10,200 people.
As you will see from the previous screenshot, the software will recognize the keyword that you are typing in, and try to add its own suggestions, so in this case, the first three suggestions are 'drums', 'drum line' and ‘drumming’. Let's choose ‘drums’. Click on ‘Continue’ and this will bring you to the 'Create Ad' screen.
Type in your ad, and watch as a draft is created for you to the right, so that you can see how the ad will appear.
Now, although you cannot see it in the example above, in some geographical locations you will see an option beneath the ad creation box on the left hand side of the screen to ‘Add social actions to my ad'.
What I believe this does is basically announce to anybody who is any way connected with me through Facebook that I have published this advertisement.
Of course, this information will automatically go to all the people in my groups, but also the information will be pushed out to people who hit Facebook web pages of other group members and so on.
Whatever the precise functions of this social action checkbox are, if you are offered the option, then I would recommend that you accept it, as it is clearly designed to promote your advertisement to as many people as possible.
Add a photo to your advert to make it more visually appealing (you can find a great source of free stock photos here) and click ‘Continue’ on again.
All you now need to do is set a budget for your advertising campaign. You will note that the suggested bids for this particular campaign range from $.38 to $.60, based on what other advertisers in this marketplace are currently paying.
By this, I believe that Facebook are referring to other people advertising in the general area of music and musical tuition.
What you also notice from the screen is that it is possible to run your advertising campaign on the basis of paying for views of your ad, rather than clicks on it (from the ‘tabs’ at the top of the active section of the screen).
If you should feel that this represents a viable option for you, click on the tab, and you will see a screen something like this:
Note that you will now be paying for the amount of impressions of your advertisement that are shown, and that in this case they are recommending a suggested bid of $.20 to $.33 per 1000 impressions.
Also note that it is necessary for you to choose whether you want your ad showing as part of the regular News Feed, or in the on screen Ad Space.
Paying for the number of views your advert enjoys maybe an option you wish to consider in the future, but for our purposes, I will continue to assume that this advertising campaign is to be run on a PPC basis.
So, a final click through will bring you to the review and payment screen, and all you need to do is input your payment details, and confirm the order.
That is your ‘Social Ads’ advert created, ready to go live.
Teething Problems
Now, as I have suggested on several previous occasions, Facebook social ads are still very much the ‘new kid on the block’, and therefore there are still a few initial teething problems to be dealt with.
Possibly the biggest problem that there is at the moment is that once your advert is created, it is impossible to go back and modify or to change it in any way.
If you need changes to be made, you must go right back to the beginning and recreate the ad from scratch once again.
If, therefore, you are going to use the Facebook ‘Social Ads’ PPC program, you should make sure that you keep a copy of your advert on your desktop or laptop computer, so that if you do need to make minor modifications or alterations, you can do so with relative ease.
This situation also applies should you wish to make changes, for example, to the targeting of your advertising as well. As it stands at the moment, therefore, the simple answer is to try and get it is right that you count the first time!
How Successful So Far?
Of course, it is still far too early to make any meaningful, constructive judgment of how successful Facebook are likely to be with their ‘Social Ads’ initiative.
Nevertheless, the standard by which all such PPC models are inevitably judged, that is, Google AdWords, was extremely successful and worked well straight out of the box.
That fact has unfortunately set the bar over which all competitors are forced to leap very high indeed.
So, the first thing that should be mentioned about ‘Social Ads’ is that the fact that you cannot go back and modify your ads once they are created is annoying at the very least!
Secondly, whilst the objective of giving people so many demographic variables may be laudable, results so far indicate that it may to at least some extent be a touch counter-productive.
For example, we already know that every time you alter any variable, it alters the number of potential customers that the system shows you.
So, what seems to be happening so far is that some people are getting shown huge potential numbers of people who might be interested in their site, but are then seeing very few ‘clickthroughs’. Indeed, some people have actually seen no results at all, despite the apparently
massive number of potential customers that Facebook indicates there are.
For the vast majority of people that have tried the system so far, the results have been somewhat disappointing.
A few examples from people that I know who are testing the system would suggest that there are still some problems that need addressing.
For example, the first example ‘tester’ that I know had a potential viewer group (i.e. the number that is shown at the top right hand corner of the screen when you go to the ‘Choose Audience’ screen) of some 10,000 and enjoyed a ‘click through’ of 165 viewers.
This is certainly less that a well placed advert with AdWords or any of the leading competitors would be expected to generate.
Balanced against that, however, is the fact that all advertising costs are primarily driven by competition, and with Facebook still being relatively unknown territory, the costs are still considerably lower than those that Google would be charging for ads that would generate similar results.
And, of course, the effectiveness (or otherwise) of all advertising is entirely predicated upon how well or how badly the advert itself has been put together.
For example, statistics have indicated time and again that ads with photos are likely to do better than those without, because pictures inevitably draw the viewer’s eyes way better than text alone can ever do.
There is even a marked difference between ads that have ‘good’ pictures, those that really appeal to viewers, and those that do not.
For proof of this, take a quick look at a site like eBay and see how many auction listings are promoted with a photo of a scantily clad lady attached, even though the picture is usually completely unrelated to the product being advertised.
So, I have no way of knowing how well any of the ads whose results I am considering here were written, but I am assuming that all of them were of a similar quality.
On balance, therefore, I would suggest that 165 clickthroughs from 10000 at a reasonable cost is probably a satisfactory result, certainly not good but not too poor either.
However, another example from the same marketing group would paint a very different picture, one that points to there being some serious system problems.
In this case, the initial potential ‘Audience’ was indicated to be over 1 million potential viewers for an advert.
Yet, a week later, there had not even been any impressions, never mind clickthroughs! In other words, the ad had not even been served to one single viewer, and so (somewhat obviously) no-one had clicked the ad!
This would suggest that there was something wrong with the system somewhere, clearly some ‘bug’ that needs ironing out and quickly as well.
The third example that I would mention is a very interesting idea for monetizing Social Ads, an idea that should, in fact, work reasonably well with any reasonable or low cost PPC resource (but, one with a sting in the tail!).
One of the most popular methods of earning money on the internet is through what are known as affiliate programs.
This is a system where an advertiser allows people to sell their products in return for a share of the initial sales price that is paid out as a commission.
In the most common scenario, most online affiliates are trying to sell or promote digital products from a site that brings many thousands of such products together into one ‘shop window’ a site like Clickbank.com, for example.
There are, however, other sites that offer similar affiliate sales programs, but for real world tangible products like perfumes, medicines, PC’s and basically anything else that you can buy in your local mall.
Again, most of these sites offer a commission for every sale that is generated from your efforts.
Some service orientated company’s will however offer a payment for each lead that is generated by you.
Products like insurance and credit cards, for example, often offer arrangements like this, sometimes paying as much as $20 per lead!
Two sites where such CPA programs might be found are Commission Junction and AzoogleAds.
So, if you can find an attractive ‘pay per lead’ offer that pays well, plus low cost advertising then you should have a winner every time, at least in theory!
This is exactly what my third example of someone using ‘Social Ads’ did. They found an attractive product with great payouts, and set up a ‘Social Ads’ campaign to drive visitors to the site.
The first day, they enjoyed thirteen visitors from the Facebook ads, and the second day, that number increased to 24.
So far, there were no sales, but, with increasing visitor numbers every day, that was surely only a matter of time.
But then, Facebook disapproved of the advert and it was pulled from the marketplace!
When the advertiser quite reasonably asked why this should be, he was told that it was because his ad was in breach of the Social Ads ‘Terms of Service’, but he was not told how exactly, or what he could do about it!
Then Facebook also decided that they were not going to allow people to use certain search key words as well, such as ‘weight loss’, ‘dating’ and ‘scholarships’.
These are very basic, seemingly non-contentious ‘meat-and-drink’ keywords for internet marketers, the banning or removal of which makes no clear sense at all.
But, again, using these words is apparently in breach of the ‘Terms of Service’.
So, are ‘Social Ads’ worth using?
Well, at the time of writing, it is probably fair to say that the jury is still out, and that the matter is undecided.
Whilst clearly a lot of the initial bugs and wrinkles will be ironed out of the system over time, only Facebook can know how many of these problems they actually want to fix.
For example, the ‘Social Ads’ moderators may decide that they do not want the Facebook site used for dating purposes, and continue to leave the word as a forbidden search term.
Whilst from the viewpoint of an internet marketer or online business owner such a decision would not appear to make much sense, they should bear in mind that both the site owners and members of the Facebook community do not want their site taking ‘down market’ as they see it.
Perhaps they see online dating or weight loss programs as something that fits into that category? Who knows?
Another perhaps more serious accusation that is leveled at the idea of Facebook running PPC advertising is that many marketers do not believe that the people using Facebook are anything more than ‘a bunch of college kids goofing off’.
In other words, the suggestion is that no-one using the Facebook site is ever going to be a really interested potential buyer.
Undoubtedly, over the past year or so, many, many serious business people have abandoned Google AdWords and begun to search for quality alternatives, but it is important to understand why before assuming that this means that these folks will start to use Social Ads, and that they will therefore ultimately be successful (as some seem to assume).
From the day that AdWords started operations right up until the present when someone goes to Google, they are in a genuine searching (and possibly buying) mode. They have set out their stall to find something and, in general, they already know what that ‘something’ is.
This is still true, and AdWords adverts are still very good at filling this market requirement.
Their effectiveness is not therefore in question
Unfortunately, over the last twelve months or so, what has been questioned (and sometimes caused people to abandon Google) has been their poor marketing, their occasionally heavy handed attitude and the sharply increasing advertising costs.
The same line of thinking would suggest that people do not go to Facebook to search for products or services. If they are seeking anything at all, it is more likely to be a friend from whom they can seek information.
They categorically do not visit any kind of community site (and especially not Facebook) with any intention of buying anything or (it may be argued) with any intention of engaging in anything that can even remotely be described as commercial activity.
If this is true, then what we are effectively saying is that no matter what business related activity they are related to, ‘Social Ads’ are never likely to be successful!
Ask yourself this question. Given what we have already established about the somewhat ‘unique’ nature of the Facebook community and its members, do they seem like the kind of folks who will embrace unfettered commercial and business ventures and organizations in their community?
It is early days for ‘Social Ads’ and only time can effectively show just how successful they are going to be.
All I would suggest is that, if you plan to spend money using ‘Social Ads’ to promote your products and services to the Facebook community, you do so with your eyes fully open.
Nor is this to say that all methods of promotion that you can use to push your products and services to Facebook community members are going to be ineffective or a waste of time.