As everyone knows in my limited freetime I am currently doing two tings:
- I am reading Eli Parisers book about the filterbubble. I don’t want to review it until I am done which happens hopefully somewhen soon. But it has a connection to the other thing I am doing
- I am promoting my Band’s first album ballads n bullets that just came out
I was able to convince my band that money invested in Google Adwords and Facebook is probably a better deal than spending money in print campaigns. Online is much more efficiant to reach our target group and introduce them to our music. So far so good! But sometimes you discover the worst or boldest things while doing something.
Some Background
As we all know facebook is filtering your social newsstream. Recently we did an update and send a reminder to all our fans on facebook (2000) and reminded them about the upcoming release. We got 2500 Impressions and received 100 clicks resulting in 6 sales. Not so cool!
Right now – just by my experience of watching impressions in facebook and several websites und seeing how much traffic comes from facebook to our homepage I am about to belief that Facebook counts ten impressions to your status update if one user visits his facebook news stream 10 times and was therby ten times able to see your news update.
Apperantly it seems that I am not mistaking with my guess. Have a look at Tim Wilson’s post on how Impressions are counted on Facebook:
http://www.gilliganondata.com/index.php/2010/01/27/facebook-measurement-impressions-from-status-updates/
Let us think again what it means to have 2500 Impressions of a status update. Could it be possible that these 2500 impressions have been generated only by a couple of users – let us say less than 200?
See how bold facebook is!
While booking ads facebook is offering me a deal that made me sit down and look twice! I am now able to buy visibility of my own status updates in the social news stream. If I pay for each click my status update receives Facebook will not only show the update to all of our fans. But they will also show the highly filtered interactions of them to their friends!
To make buying advertising even more attractive Facebook is telling me that our friend of a friend network has about 206’000 users that could be reached with the status updates of my band. Up till today my status updates only reached a visibility of 5500 impressions. The 206’000 that facebook offers me is only 40 times as much. Assuming that every user produces only one impression and we know that a user produces many more impressions.
A factor of 40 or higher is an amazingly huge number. Probably the number every marketing person has in mind when he decides that everyone has to be on facebook now!
Isn’t that insane! Facebooks user experience suggests us to be there because we get think that we get this incredible high reach. but the reality is that we get nothing but our premium customers if we don’t pay facebook. Facebook should pay me that I produce such a great content on facebook!
What should I say? It is a curse!
Everyone jumps on the facebook train with the totally wrong expectations. No not everyone and all of their friends see your advertising and status updates!
Of course if something really sepcial happens facebook really makes you viral but most the time you have no advanage by using facebook in comparison to other marketing methods. Especially the only one that is winning always is facebook. I have hardly seen any brand in the world that was printed and promoted on so many flyer / poster / and mags and even tv commercials. Amazingly facebook did not even pay one Cent to appear on all these media. Everyone pushes their own facebook channel – hoping to become viral – instead of pushing their own brand and thinking about how to really bring out the brand and do marketing or thinking about how to make a great product.
Everyone seems to expect miracles from Facebook
Hello everybody! Think about it! The world wide GNP won’t grow just because everyone is now using facebook! It is only facebook that is growing!
By the way I was warning everyone about the fact that you should focus on your website and not on facebook in one of my articles about the perfect band website. It is just to risky to relay on facebook. First it was great. now it is big and policies are changed over and over again!