Thousands of marketers have tried pilot advertising spends on Facebook, getting their fingers burned with high CPAs and low ROIs. Thousands of marketers and agencies will keep at it, combining multiple combinations of creatives, keywords and placements. It is closer in its nature to display advertising than bread and butter pay-per-click advertising. This would lead you to assume that Facebook’s algorithms are simply more naive and basic. However, Facebook’s paid for algorithm apparently has over 140 different factors that influence the display of its advertisements. It has recently been well publicised that semantic search has been added into Facebook’s functionality – taking you back to the data protection fears raised by Google Adsense and Google Mail several years ago. So when booking any Facebook ad spend, quiz whoever is booking the media thoroughly and create some basic searches/tests that should bring back your ads.
Here is the show stopper. If an individual on Facebook likes your page, then you have approximately 7 days to get them to interact with your FBP (post comment, post clickthrough, upload a link, photo etc) then your business’s posts will drop off of their news feed. Think about the ‘influencers’ – the ones that come back to your page time and time again. It could be between 1-20% of your fan base that see your posts – meaning that you have to work extra hard to provide compelling, valuable content that will keep people coming back without having to actively digging out your Facebook Business Pages.
So social media is fully here to stay, with it becoming a dominant, compulsory discipline for SEO development and strategy. However, don’t rush at it – listen to your customers and get back to them at the speed of light!