A damning report from respected analysts Forrester Research claims that Facebook has all but abandoned social media marketing and instead relies on ‘old fashioned’ display advertising and rudimentary targeting – costing many businesses dear and losing out on billions of dollars of marketing spend, says the report.
The report – written by Forrester’s vice president and principal analyst Nate Elliott – claims Facebook has “abandoned its promise” to revolutionise marketing with social ads and has instead “become almost entirely reliant on the traditional advertising models it once lampooned”: display ads and simplistic targeting.
Facebook “no longer supports social marketing”, the report claims. Facebook instead “teases marketers” with the promise it will better connect them with their customers, yet on average Facebook only shows a brand’s page posts to 16 per cent of its fans.
On the paid advertising front, Forrester claims that fewer than 15 per cent of the billions of daily display Facebook ad impressions leverage social data to reach more relevant audiences and its static image ad units offer marketers less impact per impression than they could achieve with ad units from other sites
Forrester polled 395 marketing and “e-business executives” from the UK, US and Canada to gauge their satisfaction in various different digital marketing channels. Of the 13 online marketing sites and tactics those marketers were questioned about, Facebook came bottom in terms of satisfaction when it comes to driving business value (see table), below sites such as Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn. Marketers polled were most satisfied with on-site ratings and reviews.
In addition, just 51 per cent of marketers said they were satisfied with Facebook as a marketing partner, behind Google, LinkedIn and Yahoo.
Forrester then pours salt on the wound, and recommends advertisers not create a dedicated budget for Facebook: “If you want to buy ads on Facebook, rely on facts rather than faith. We’ve no doubt that for some marketers targeting some audiences, Facebook advertising can work.
“If the site really performs well compared with your other media buys, go ahead and spend money there. But marketers tell us Facebook ads generate less business value than display ads on other sites. It’s time to make decisions based on facts, not on faith or fascination. You’re just buying display ads! Don’t dedicate a paid ad budget for Facebook. Make it compete with other media buys based on performance, just as you would any other site.”
It continues: “We don’t believe that Facebook will make the changes needed to win back marketers’ hearts. In fact, we don’t believe the company even sees the need to change: Its enormous revenues have blinded it to marketers’ growing dissatisfaction. But if it doesn’t change, the results will be dire”.
So far Facebook has taken it all very well. In a posting a Facebook spokesman responded: “While we agree that the promise of social media is still in process, the conclusions in this report are at times illogical and at others irresponsible. The reality is that Facebook advertising works. That’s why we have more than a million active advertisers. And countless studies have demonstrated the significant return on investment marketers see from Facebook.”
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