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Just read this illuminating post from a former esteemed colleague. It coincided well with my attempt just a few hours ago to find the pages that I’ve “liked” on Facebook. I wanted to see if I had remembered to like a company page to get into their free iPad2 drawing. I have declared to my family that I will be getting an iPad 2 when it comes out, and since it snuck up on me I’ve not yet prepared my strategy for explaining why we should purchase that before some other things we need. Thus, a free iPad would be great!
However, I was not successful. I can’t find my pages at all. I looked on the company page in question and I don’t see any evidence that I liked the page. I’m sure I can find out where they went somehow, but I’ve already taken a few steps and I just don’t care enough right now to track them down. From a user experience perspective, however, this type of change should not just happen without some sort of obvious notification, which I’m pretty sure I didn’t get.
Mr. McLaren’s post points out that marketers will now have to “pay to play” and will need to reconsider their Facebook strategy and investment. It seems everyone has been waiting for the moment when the big social media players turn off the free spigot on some of their offerings. This will be a big decision point for many companies.
Related posts:
- The World’s Facebook Relationships Visualized
- Why IBM’s Acquisition of Coremetrics Will Change Web Analytics
- Using SSL only for some WebSphere Portal pages
- Yet more proof that Facebook isn’t just a college kid’s social network anymore
Tags: facebook, marketing, social media, social software
You can look at this like a canary in the coal mine for net neutrality. It seems obvious to the bystander that when services change in this way, it damages said service in terms of freedom of access. The free-ness of the internet, and in kind, Facebook, has been part of what has spurned the incredible growth of each… much like the once free and wild West. When what was free becomes not free, it’s like taxing that behavior to raise revenue. A tax, from the perspective of the taxed, is a disincentive to activity because those who are taxed naturally gravitate to the least expensive alternative available to them.
So corporate presence on Facebook will soon become, as you point out, a cost equation to be weighed against long standing paid advertising like Google ads. When many of those lower capital corporate entities begin migrating off of Facebook due to the cost to use (in their case, presence and brand access and recognition is the chief use), like any other formerly free space, only those with the money will remain (as in remain close to the powers that be). Once those parties dominate the corporate presence and have the majority of the contributions in cash being made to the ongoing existence of Facebook, they will have more and more say in how it operates. There are parallels that can be drawn between this migration and the history of many nations. The trick to long term profitability is finding the most profitable, most attractive to the most number of users position one can attain and staying there despite pressures to move on to either broader acceptance or higher profitability. I think Facebook is pursuing the later and that it will ultimately be to their detriment. (full disclosure, I left Facebook in disgust over these constant changes about a year ago)
Great comments, Jerry. I feel Facebook’s pain; they have to make tough decisions to create a sustainable business model, and the wrong move could upset the apple cart, as you suggest. They eventually need more revenue than ads and virtual gifts, and they have a number of possibilities for that, all of which are subject to user and business acceptance. If they lose business acceptance, they lose their revenue base. If they lose users, they lose their attractiveness to businesses. Not easy decisions for them.
As a consumer, I’ve always been a fan of targeted marketing. I’d love for all businesses to use what they can from what I put out there about myself to sell me what I personally would like. I hate buying almost anything anymore because of the number of features, products, prices, recommendations I have to assess.
Some people recoil at the notion that marketers know so much about you that they try to sell you something based on your profile, and that’s another user experience issue to deal with, but I think generally if they can keep the business part from overtaking the social experience, but rather enhance it while remaining somewhat in the periphery, they can have the best of both worlds. Will be interesting to see where it all goes.
I think you should be on the board at Facebook. Targeted marketing is the “staring you in the face” solution to their cash-flow problems. This parallels a conversation I had today regarding salaries and our perspective as “employees” rather than being small individual businesses. It changes the relationship a lot. I think consumer acceptance of targeted marketing is subject to the same change of perspective – one from being a consumer, and hence “owed” a certain unobtainable perfect buying experience to one of being a small business and the marketing message being one of value proposition to my specific needs. In order for me to have a successful and efficient business transaction with a marketer and reduce my non productive time, I have to be willing to communicate with my suppliers. Facebook would benefit from viewing their users as business partners with needs to fill and advertisers as suppliers with product to move. Targeted marketing is the obvious role for Facebook here. Great insight. Hope they are listening!
Thanks for the reference, Molly! I appreciate your conversation with Jerry as well – you both bring up great points. I think we’re all in agreement that marketing in Facebook can be a frustrating endeavor due to the many frequent changes they make which (in this case) force a new reckoning. Will the changes actually cause marketers to shift away from, rather than toward, Facebook? For the major players, I doubt it. But I think the smaller players and latecomers should be weighing their investment options anew. Time will tell…
Of course Facebook is doing targeted marketing now, they just need to keep tweaking it and experimenting with ways to get users’ attention when it would truly be valuable to users. From what I read/hear, many targeted ads on Facebook fail miserably but others are quite successful depending on whether they’re targeted to the right audiences. I wonder if there are any stats that compare the click-thru rate of merchandising ads v. event/group-based ads. I’d bet that the ads that somehow bring the person outside of the electronic world, or into more community in general, do better. My old church had tons of people visit because they saw a Facebook ad.
Allowing other companies to use Facebook data to personalize their own users’ site experiences and marketing efforts seems promising too. Of course then you have the privacy concerns and opt-in requirements. Any location-based marketing efforts would be a natural win too if they can either combine with the more successful apps doing that better, or get more people to want to opt-in to location-based services with Facebook, like Facebook Places. So far, that doesn’t seem to be gaining a lot of traction based on my small sample size of my friends. Here’s an interesting article about that: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-places-may-have-30-million-users-but-none-of-them-use-it-very-much-2010-10
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