Is Facebook Marketing Really Dead? | Get Fact Up #83

Chris Hogan: G'day world. Chris Hogan and Andrew Groat coming to you live from MeMedia Studio here at Burleigh Heads, for Episode 83 of Get Fact Up. Today we're talking about ...

Andrew Groat: The death of Facebook marketing, the apparent death of Facebook.

Chris Hogan: The shit-storm that is Facebook at the moment or that people think is what's happening. Recently, just a few days ago, or a day ago. I've lost track of time. Zuckerberg sat in the Senate meeting in the US and ...

Andrew Groat: Nothing happened basically.

Chris Hogan: Taught Senators how the internet works and how Facebook works.

Andrew Groat: Yeah, there were some really stupid questions asked to him. Well basically there was no implication on his part and all that happened from that is they sort of established that maybe there should be more laws around social media in general.

Chris Hogan: So I think we need to back up a little bit first of all and give people a bit of background. Well let's not talk timeframes but recently Facebook was amidst the scandal with a third party company who they were sharing data with, that basically were breaching privacy on that data. There was privacy breaches on that data. What was their name?

Andrew Groat: Cambridge Analytica.

Chris Hogan: Great.

Andrew Groat: And the fully thing about that was technically Facebook didn't actually do anything wrong in that. That was at the time entirely part of their privacy policy, the data that they shared with Cambridge Analytica. They kept the data and then used it afterwards, so for some reason they got off scot-free, apart from the CEO stepping down, and Facebook took most of the brunt of that. But that was quite some time ago, that's not a recent thing, it popped up again recently after something else.

Chris Hogan: Yep. So all of a sudden the user world, the Facebook user world, and also the marketers on Facebook have started jumping up and down, and thinking that Facebook's not a safe place to be, and there have been exits, as in companies have pulled pages down. The likes of Tesla and other companies have basically said, "How are we going to market anymore?" They don't know how to market. One of those things is that when estimating or creating your advertisements on Facebook you're currently not able to see how many people you're going to reach.

Andrew Groat: Oh, yeah the bid to reach estimator. The funny thing about that is, I would say for the last two years that's been completely unreliable. Not just a little bit unreliable, it's been like, "Oh yeah, if you spend this much, you'll get this much," and everyone's seen that graph, even if you're just doing a boost, it'll say, "Spend a little bit more and you can reach 1,000 people." That's been way, not just a little bit off, that's been way off for a long time.

Chris Hogan: Yeah, and for Facebook markets that have been doing stuff they know that completely, because what still stands now is, yes you can't see what you're going to get, it's been off anyway, but we always know what we've got. The data we've said before in previous Get Fact Ups is that accessing that reliable data is not through the likes of the on-page insights and the reporting that is in the back of Facebook, or even third party tools, it is through exporting the data into a CSB file, which can analyse via an Excel spreadsheet and that's where you'll find the reliable data on your reach, engagement, video views et cetera. So that's where we're at right now. We've seen this, I guess this big rise in negative talk about, "Oh no marketers aren't going to be able to use Facebook. Oh companies aren't don't trust Facebook. Oh people don't trust Facebook," so they're shutting down their profiles. So what do we reckon? Do we reckon Facebook's dead?

Andrew Groat: No I don't think so. I think the problem is people are just jumping on top of this. You know what they say about empty vessels. We're getting a lot of emails and stuff that are saying, "Facebook's dead. Facebook, all the metrics that we use for Facebook are dead," all that sort of thing, but the thing is no one's really offered a solution. For anyone that's saying that, there is no solution at the moment. Like, if you're not going to use Facebook for your social media marketing, what are you going to use? The other big options are Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Instagram which is Facebook. None of them can offer you the tools and the reach that Facebook can. So if there's a mass exodus at Facebook, which there isn't. There is a loud and small exodus at Facebook right now, but it's not very much. If there's no alternatives, not an awful lot's going to change in the long term. This is a bump in the road if anything.

Chris Hogan: And for us marketers that are still in the game, still using Facebook to drive heaps of traffic and leads for our clients. By all means marketers exit, go for it.

Andrew Groat: Yeah, yeah exactly right.

Chris Hogan: Leave more space for us.

Andrew Groat: The thing is when things all tumble down like this, there's obviously going to be some inevitable changes, like yes they're removing certain metrics that they don't want people to be able to use because of changes to data privacy and stuff like that, but that doesn't mean that they're useless. It's a level playing field. So everybody's going to receive the same changes. The people that learn the differences and learn how to use these changes the fastest are the ones that are going to profit from this.

Chris Hogan: Absolutely.

Andrew Groat: It's about being smart when things change.

Chris Hogan: So I guess we could almost cut if off and say that Facebook is a super powerful tool to do your marketing. You can do all of the existing marketing that you could do before, and there's just a few less, I guess speculative insights that you're not going to get. But you're going to get all the great data and access to engagements and insights, that you could before. So really nothing has really changed.

Andrew Groat: Nothing.

Chris Hogan: Nothing useful has really changed.

Andrew Groat: Exactly. To be honest the things that everybody is saying, "Oh these are going to be removed, as a reaction to the controversy." These things, the reach and the other metrics, they were always going to be removed. There's been a notice on Facebook for about a year saying that, "We're removing these redundant metrics." Everyone knows they've been redundant, Facebook knows they're redundant, but people are still relying on them. If you think that you're going to get 300,000 reach for promoting a video for $10, you're wrong, because if you look at your results you're not. That's what you should be tracking. That's what you should be putting in a spreadsheet and comparing, is your results.

So it just comes down to everyone should be doing their own due diligence, and checking their own results, and checking their own results and optimising their results based on changes they make. Checking your analytics if you're sending your traffic to a website then you're getting the actual data there. Like you said, exporting your results because we know that that's not using data sampling, so you're getting the actual numbers. Just basically doing the hard work. So nothing of significance is changing.

Chris Hogan: That's all we've got time for. If you have questions by all means ask them. We're here to help and that's why we produced Get Fact Up. Sometimes it feels like a bit of a one-way conversation but we encourage it the other way, and always go back and back what we've said, but happy to revise episodes, with new episodes, if there's something of interest or specifically you've enquired about them, maybe that we've said hasn't made sense. So we're on LinkedIn, we're on Facebook, we're in Insta, we're on memedia.com.au, subscribe there and you can get us in your inbox every Monday morning. Cheers Andy.

Andrew Groat: Thank you.

Chris Hogan: Cheers.