Why Most Facebook Marketing Doesn't Work

>Facebook users are very sophisticated

Whoa, that is news to me. I always thought Facebook catered towards the lowest common denominator. The average Facebook user is not that sophisticated by definition of using Facebook over alternatives. Most sophisticated users are early adapters and they are probably not using Facebook to engage brands.

Indeed brands shouldn't try and create over complicated apps to gain attractiveness. Sticking to simple marketing, like Old Spice. Create one unique thing and play it over and over until it finally dies.

The second page of the article claims that asking for extended permissions on a Facebook application results in significant drop-off. The article doesn't cite any data, and this contradicts my impression that users blindly click through any and all dialog boxes. Wonder which is true.

The sweepstakes part of the article seems like it can be made to work:

> "There is absolutely no incentive to make sweepstakes social. Why would you invite more people to join a sweepstakes? It reduces your own chances."

Then increase a user's chances as they spread it? Let them send a link to their friends - if they click it they both get an extra entry to the contest. Similar to how LivingSocial recently pulled off the Amazon gift card deal.

> Uploading a photo or video is a big investment on the part of the user, and they do not expect to do it for the vast majority of businesses.

Then make it easy. MMS your picture to NNNNN or email it to picture@contest.tld

It's not that users don't want to upload pictures, but taking a picture, copying to your computer, and then uploading it with your browser is a convoluted pain in the ass. Reduce friction and people will bite - especially when there's something in it for them (be the sexiest Facebook American Apparel model and win! get your friends to vote for your picture!)

Most Web 1.0 marketing didn't work. It didn't work because marketers didn't yet understand the point of the web. Their marketing plans were about as sophisticated as "We should really get onto this web thing everyone's talking about."

By the same token, most FB marketing isn't working as intended because the marketers don't grok the point of FB. You can't just stick content on FB and then build social elements around it. You have to have a compellingly social experience that then gets skinned with branding and possible sell-through options. Social must come first.

This is a frustrating notion for classically trained marketers, because to a classically trained marketer, the strategy must always preceed the tactic. The strategy -- driving people to the product/brand, benefits and identity of the brand, etc. -- usually gives rise to the tactics.

On Facebook, however, that's just not how users engage with one another. No one's there to look for Pepsi. They're there to look for each other. Pepsi, in this hypothetical example, would be much better served with a really cool feature or social utility that is lightly skinned with Pepsi branding than it would be with a really pretty, expensive, heavily branded experience that just sits on FB waiting to be discovered. That's not to say that Pepsi can't have its cake and eat it, too. The holy grail, obviously, is a compelling social utility that is uniquely Pepsi's and works especially well for Pepsi the way it couldn't for Coke (or for Bank of America, or Geico, or Nike, or P&G, or whoever). But in getting to that holy grail, build for social first. Then build for your brand.

I'll say it's depending on what a brand's goal on FB page is. If it's about increasing brand's visibility or engaging conversations with fans, FB should do the job. However, the most important part of the marketing is to convert people to become customers, whether they are fan or not. We are currently building a website called ProsBank.com which provides an easy way for professionals to convert fans or non-fans into customers. The gap from being fans/non-fnas to becoming customers really needs to be filled.

Note that this article is targeted at brands and not startups. If your objective is conversions instead of engagement, Facebook marketing can work very well.

I've dabbled quite a bit with FB display marketing. Its surprising that the author hardly talks about FB display advertising.

It depends upon what you are marketing.

I've been playing around with Facebook communication for the last couple of months. For instance, I created a fan page for hn-books ( http://www.facebook.com/pages/Hn-books/176636875710129?ref=s... ) and for what it does, it's a nice little hack. It's deeper than a tweet, easily allows multimedia posting, provides a bit of a water-cooler, and, since the feed shows up on all of hn-books pages, people who visit the site can see what's going on in the FB page, and vice-versa.

As this article indicates, I think it's probably very easy to get into trouble with overdoing it. FB is more like a new form of communication channel, not a new form of marketing, if that makes any sense. You see this same confusing the medium with the message with marketers on Twitter. FB just carries my same message -- looking at some cool books, did a review last night, etc -- that Twitter might. It just has slightly different capabilities. I am beginning to think of these different tools almost like channels on a TV set. If you wanted to have a conversation with a certain group of people who like a similar thing, you wouldn't sit around obsessing over a certain cable channel and how you were going to use all it's capabilities to construct complex interactions. Instead, you'd figure out what kinds of conversations you wanted, then pick among dozens or hundreds of channels that help you talk back and forth in different ways. Message first, not medium.