8 ms·

"Facebook was one of our better-performing channels at the time that we made the decision" Everyone likes to say they don't use Facebook, but they do. Or at le

by dpcan 7y ago

"Facebook was one of our better-performing channels at the time that we made the decision" Everyone likes to say they don't use Facebook, but they do. Or at least 10 people they know do. Local businesses use Facebook relentlessly because, lots of times, it actually works to get people in the door or calling your number. Small businesses almost have to use its ad platform (in my opinion). I don't think local businesses can afford to look away from a top performer like this. When I ran an escape room business, my fill-rate on weekends was typically dependent on whether or not I was spending money on Facebook. Google ads were second. Anything else barely had any ROI. Well - in the first few months of running the business, the local newspaper actually brought in some people, but nothing compared to my longer ad runs on Facebook. I feel like this is a "you don't need Facebook" chant, but I feel that's not true for all industries, and I hope the take-away here is that maybe a huge online business with a giant ad budget can find other means, but if you are a small local business with $300 a month for marketing, I personally believe that you kind-of need Facebook.

Trisell 7y ago
I’m in my mid thirties. I work with a teen program. To get in touch with them I have to use Instagram or Snapchat. All of my friends that are my current age or older. They are all still on Facebook posting memes and political rants. I think it still makes sense to target Facebook. They have the larger share of the 30+ crowd that most businesses see as their target audience.
- mastazi 7y ago
  We should note that Instagram is owned by Facebook and Facebook Ads is the tool that you typically use to create and manage ads on both networks.
josefresco 7y ago
>Local businesses use Facebook relentlessly because, lots of times, it actually works to get people in the door or calling your number. Small businesses almost have to use its ad platform (in my opinion). I don't think local businesses can afford to look away from a top performer like this. Anecdotally, based on my experience working with over 250 local businesses across the business spectrum, this doesn't reflect reality. A very small percentage of my clients "actively" use "organic" Facebook, an even smaller percentage use their ad platform (much higher usage of Google Ads). The ones that do (buy FB ads), typically do so through local "media company" who tack on their own fees, which in turn makes it a poor investment. I can count on one hand (out of hundreds) the number of our clients who effectively use Facebook. In fact, in the last couple of years, the number of businesses forgoing a "real website" and choosing Facebook (a common theme just a few years ago) has basically disappeared.
- ratww 7y ago
  Can confirm. I used to work for a large media companies, and the consensus in our area is that Facebook used to be a primary channel in the past, but now it's a secondary engagement channel (behind Instagram and Twitter), and a secondary organic source (much less people is using it to find businesses). It's going down in all metrics. The only businesses still relying on Facebook are event-based: concerts, parties, exhibitions, etc. Because they use FB Events. But even Instagram is taking over in that area. Other than that, Facebook business pages are just becoming a place for marketing to dump stuff.
  - e2021 7y ago
    You know FB owns Instagram though right? Why do they care if you spend money there or on FB proper?
    - vageli 7y ago
      > You know FB owns Instagram though right? Why do they care if you spend money there or on FB proper? Because the audiences are different?
      - benj111 7y ago
        I don't follow. The audiences for Starbucks Latte and Cappuccino are different. Starbucks is indifferent whether you buy one or the other though.
        tracker1 7y ago
        A better analogy would be Pizza Hut or Taco Bell ... They absolutely market both and some share space, that doesn't mean they each respectively don't care where the spend goes. If people are buying from Taco Bell, the Pizza Hut a block away may or may not shut down, and spending efforts will reflect those differences.
        7y ago
tyri_kai_psomi 7y ago
Facebook reminds me a lot of AOL in this regard that it is the internet for most people: in the early internet AOL was the internet for the casual user: someone who wanted to maybe check some messages, check the news on a few sites, and check in on a few groups. The same type of user now prefers Facebook to be their portal to the internet because in their view why not have it all in one place? The rest of the internet is confusing. There's viruses and all these scary things out there! And I won't know how to find anything! All my friends are here already, why would I go anywhere else? I know most of the younger generation doesn't think like this, but then again Facebook isn't a young person's platform anymore. I would almost certainly prefer that those small businesses had their own website that I could visit, but I know most people don't think like that, and the business itself doesn't want to pay some random dev shop whatever fee to develop and run it when they can just post it on facebook and get 80% of the benefit.
ravenstine 7y ago
It can depend on the business, I think. I've been working on starting a business in the beauty & wellness industry, and every single wellness spa owner I've talked to has told me that social media advertising is basically a joke and that, while it will bring in some people, it doesn't compare to old school word-of-mouth, visibility, coupons, local magazine ads, etc. On the other hand, my family's bookshop relies a lot on social media to get the word out. I suspect social media is more important for businesses that aren't viewed as necessities or are competing with convenience. (people tend to view wellness, beauty, anti-aging, facials, etc., as necessities if they depend on them regularly even though they aren't true necessities, which is why such industries tend to fare well even during recessions) This probably isn't all Facebook's doing, but just the changing nature of how people get their information. Before Facebook, it was TV ads and ads in the newspaper, but nobody viewed those platforms as being nefarious. Now people are on the internet and watching cable less and less, so something's got to take the place of TV ads.
- josefresco 7y ago
  > it doesn't compare to old school word-of-mouth, visibility, coupons, local magazine ads, etc. This matches my experience working for small biz owners as well. It's funny, years ago we (techies) all told these business owners what a waste "traditional" advertising was. "Shift your print/radio/tv ad budgets to digital" we said, "it's trackable" we said, and now it's shifting back as digital ads are not returning the same value thanks to ...very accurate tracking. Meanwhile, local radio was destroyed and rebuilt, local print is also currently rebuilding (not quite there yet) and TV is becoming more affordable as they have to now compete with digital.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    Is it that social media is worse, or that returns on advertising for local businesses have always been bad but only when we could track them have we noticed? We (a local micro-business) tried tracking our print adverts by including coupons and found nearly the only people using them were current customers. Direct word-of-mouth was by far our most successful advertising (either from customers, or staff handing out leaflets in the street).
ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago
There's having Facebook and then there's using Facebook. I think most people who say they don't use Facebook still maintain an account for things that require it.
- oska 7y ago
  Nothing 'requires' Facebook. Absolutely nothing. Anything that you can do through Facebook can be done through another channel, including direct contact with the other party.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    My mom came to visit me one time and forgot to tell the mom of one of the kids she was tutoring the week before that she would be out of town and she didn’t have her number. The mom was from my hometown and I knew her from high school. We were Facebook friends but I didn’t have her number either. I sent her message on messenger and she responded immediately. Facebook Messenger is like the ultimate opt in for contacts. People you don’t know at all get filtered when trying to contact you, but people you know tangentially or see once every few years are still reachable. I would have no reason to have this person’s number. There are plenty of people that I might contact about something but I wouldn’t have their number. I was also planning a surprise for my wife’s birthday and coordinating for her to have a girl’s night out with her friends. I wouldn’t have her friends numbers, but I was able to message them.
jfengel 7y ago
I have similar experiences with my theater troupe. It's very different from trying to market a national or global scale product. The market is small and hyper-local: people won't travel far for it, and only a small percentage of the community want it. They exist, but connecting with them is difficult without blanketing the area. Facebook serves the same niche as the local newspaper used to. Those newspapers are disappearing, and people pay little attention where they do. Everybody reads Facebook. (If the "kids" have moved away from it, well, they're not really our target market anyway.)
- oska 7y ago
  > Everybody reads Facebook. No they don't. Far from it. > Those newspapers are disappearing, and people pay little attention where they do. Local newspapers are coming back. There are at least three glossy free newspapers where I live (published weekly or monthly) that are packed full of local advertising and local news stories, local identity profiles, etc.
  - thfuran 7y ago
    >No they don't. Far from it. That's technically correct but some 1.6 billion active daily users is kind of a big deal. "Everybody Uses facebook" is about as close accurate as you're going to get for an "Everybody does X" claim this side of "eats".
Skunkleton 7y ago
Individuals don’t need Facebook. Once people realize that, businesses won’t need them either.
catacombs 7y ago
> Everyone likes to say they don't use Facebook, but they do. Or at least 10 people they know do. I can confirm there are certainly people who don't use Facebook. I'm one of them and don't have any regrets dropping the platform years ago. It's just a boomer-meme-filled wasteland now.
- smbowner 7y ago
  Do you use any FB properties?
  - catacombs 7y ago
    Zero. No FB, no Instagram, no WhatsApp.
forgotmypw 7y ago
The times I've found someone's identified belongings and successfully returned them, it was through Facebook.
themagician 7y ago
Facebook is a really great platform for getting clicks and likes. But most traffic is fake or garbage. Locally things look a little better as long as you aren’t in a metro that is dominated with bogus traffic. Works great for small business outside of major metro areas.
dwild 7y ago
> When I ran an escape room business, my fill-rate on weekends was typically dependent on whether or not I was spending money on Facebook. Google ads were second. It's funny because I was going to comment on that about the escape room of my SO and about how Facebook in her case was quite ineffective. I was taking care of her campaigns because she isn't tech savvy at all. I was spending 150$ a month on Facebook and the same amount on Google Adword, but we had a much better return on Google. There wasn't much advertising for escape room on Facebook for our area either, so that may explain why. There's quite a bit of them on Google Ads, but we only have ads on Google Adword for now. I'm not the best in advertising though and didn't spend that much time on it, so we could most probably optimize that quite a bit and maybe then Facebook could be better. We are exclusively on Google now and I did optimize it a bit to reach 4.75% CTR. I have an hard time tracking correctly the conversion with Resova (we are going to migrate out of them too, so I won't spend too much time on it either) so for now CTR is good enough.
- kelnos 7y ago
  This raises an interesting question for me: how do people find real-life things on the internet? If I want to find an escape room near me, I'll do a web search, or possibly open Google Maps on my phone and search for it. It wouldn't even occur to me to use Facebook for this (granted, I've been off FB for a year now, with an account open just for event invitations, so I may not be typical). Do people actually type searches to find things off-internet into FB's search box? Or is the advertising "discovery" more organic, in that escape room ads are just showing up in people's FB timeline or alongside unrelated Google searches (or on sites that display Google ads), and people think "oh, neat, I like escape rooms, I should try this one"?
  - dwild 7y ago
    > how do people find real-life things on the internet? Originally I was planning to put them all on Facebook because I was expecting our market to be there (young adult who want to do something with friends). I was only taking ads on Google because even with the exact name, the result was too far. I was planning to remove it but as the CPC was much lower than on Facebook, I kept it with a few dollars per day. > I'll do a web search, or possibly open Google Maps on my phone and search for it. That what seems to be happening. Google Maps is one of our best source of conversion. During the first 12 months my SO asked most people where they found the escape room and a majority were from Google Maps. On Google My Business their stats show that in the past 30 days it was displayed 20k times, which is quite good. The CTR isn't amazing but it's still something and the number of calls is actually not too bad considering that I don't expect most people to use the call button of Google Maps to book. I'll probably try to pay for ads on Google Maps and Waze soon.
qroshan 7y ago
Well, why would you want to listen to arm-chair-experts who have ZERO skin in the game and likes to play "My Life is so good. Let's manufacture some persecution outrage so that I can yell"
holler 7y ago
So then how did these types of businesses survive pre-facebook?
- 0xffff2 7y ago
  Were escape rooms even a thing pre-Facebook? They seem like a distinctly 21st century business to me.
- saalweachter 7y ago
  So long ago, in the dark days before 1991, bloggers would send their blog posts to centralized publishers who would collect all of these posts together and print them on big sheets of paper every morning that they would bundle together and sell for a nominal fee to the blogers' followers. Because the subscribers weren't willing to pay the full cost of producing these papers, the publishers would let local business owners pay them to include their own blog posts advertising their business. The people reading these papers each day would learn about local businesses and events from these advertisements.
- analyst74 7y ago
  Escape rooms were invitation-only back then, and most did not get out.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
justanothersys 7y ago
Makes sense, as Facebook’s interface is designed just like an escape room.

by dpcan 7y ago

Trisell 7y ago

I’m in my mid thirties. I work with a teen program. To get in touch with them I have to use Instagram or Snapchat. All of my friends that are my current age or older. They are all still on Facebook posting memes and political rants. I think it still makes sense to target Facebook. They have the larger share of the 30+ crowd that most businesses see as their target audience.

mastazi 7y ago
We should note that Instagram is owned by Facebook and Facebook Ads is the tool that you typically use to create and manage ads on both networks.

josefresco 7y ago

>Local businesses use Facebook relentlessly because, lots of times, it actually works to get people in the door or calling your number. Small businesses almost have to use its ad platform (in my opinion). I don't think local businesses can afford to look away from a top performer like this. Anecdotally, based on my experience working with over 250 local businesses across the business spectrum, this doesn't reflect reality. A very small percentage of my clients "actively" use "organic" Facebook, an even smaller percentage use their ad platform (much higher usage of Google Ads). The ones that do (buy FB ads), typically do so through local "media company" who tack on their own fees, which in turn makes it a poor investment. I can count on one hand (out of hundreds) the number of our clients who effectively use Facebook. In fact, in the last couple of years, the number of businesses forgoing a "real website" and choosing Facebook (a common theme just a few years ago) has basically disappeared.

ratww 7y ago
Can confirm. I used to work for a large media companies, and the consensus in our area is that Facebook used to be a primary channel in the past, but now it's a secondary engagement channel (behind Instagram and Twitter), and a secondary organic source (much less people is using it to find businesses). It's going down in all metrics. The only businesses still relying on Facebook are event-based: concerts, parties, exhibitions, etc. Because they use FB Events. But even Instagram is taking over in that area. Other than that, Facebook business pages are just becoming a place for marketing to dump stuff.
- e2021 7y ago
  You know FB owns Instagram though right? Why do they care if you spend money there or on FB proper?
  - vageli 7y ago
    > You know FB owns Instagram though right? Why do they care if you spend money there or on FB proper? Because the audiences are different?
    - benj111 7y ago
      I don't follow. The audiences for Starbucks Latte and Cappuccino are different. Starbucks is indifferent whether you buy one or the other though.
      - tracker1 7y ago
        A better analogy would be Pizza Hut or Taco Bell ... They absolutely market both and some share space, that doesn't mean they each respectively don't care where the spend goes. If people are buying from Taco Bell, the Pizza Hut a block away may or may not shut down, and spending efforts will reflect those differences.
        7y ago

tyri_kai_psomi 7y ago

Facebook reminds me a lot of AOL in this regard that it is the internet for most people: in the early internet AOL was the internet for the casual user: someone who wanted to maybe check some messages, check the news on a few sites, and check in on a few groups. The same type of user now prefers Facebook to be their portal to the internet because in their view why not have it all in one place? The rest of the internet is confusing. There's viruses and all these scary things out there! And I won't know how to find anything! All my friends are here already, why would I go anywhere else? I know most of the younger generation doesn't think like this, but then again Facebook isn't a young person's platform anymore. I would almost certainly prefer that those small businesses had their own website that I could visit, but I know most people don't think like that, and the business itself doesn't want to pay some random dev shop whatever fee to develop and run it when they can just post it on facebook and get 80% of the benefit.

ravenstine 7y ago

It can depend on the business, I think. I've been working on starting a business in the beauty & wellness industry, and every single wellness spa owner I've talked to has told me that social media advertising is basically a joke and that, while it will bring in some people, it doesn't compare to old school word-of-mouth, visibility, coupons, local magazine ads, etc. On the other hand, my family's bookshop relies a lot on social media to get the word out. I suspect social media is more important for businesses that aren't viewed as necessities or are competing with convenience. (people tend to view wellness, beauty, anti-aging, facials, etc., as necessities if they depend on them regularly even though they aren't true necessities, which is why such industries tend to fare well even during recessions) This probably isn't all Facebook's doing, but just the changing nature of how people get their information. Before Facebook, it was TV ads and ads in the newspaper, but nobody viewed those platforms as being nefarious. Now people are on the internet and watching cable less and less, so something's got to take the place of TV ads.

josefresco 7y ago
> it doesn't compare to old school word-of-mouth, visibility, coupons, local magazine ads, etc. This matches my experience working for small biz owners as well. It's funny, years ago we (techies) all told these business owners what a waste "traditional" advertising was. "Shift your print/radio/tv ad budgets to digital" we said, "it's trackable" we said, and now it's shifting back as digital ads are not returning the same value thanks to ...very accurate tracking. Meanwhile, local radio was destroyed and rebuilt, local print is also currently rebuilding (not quite there yet) and TV is becoming more affordable as they have to now compete with digital.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  Is it that social media is worse, or that returns on advertising for local businesses have always been bad but only when we could track them have we noticed? We (a local micro-business) tried tracking our print adverts by including coupons and found nearly the only people using them were current customers. Direct word-of-mouth was by far our most successful advertising (either from customers, or staff handing out leaflets in the street).

ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago

There's having Facebook and then there's using Facebook. I think most people who say they don't use Facebook still maintain an account for things that require it.

oska 7y ago
Nothing 'requires' Facebook. Absolutely nothing. Anything that you can do through Facebook can be done through another channel, including direct contact with the other party.
- scarface74 7y ago
  My mom came to visit me one time and forgot to tell the mom of one of the kids she was tutoring the week before that she would be out of town and she didn’t have her number. The mom was from my hometown and I knew her from high school. We were Facebook friends but I didn’t have her number either. I sent her message on messenger and she responded immediately. Facebook Messenger is like the ultimate opt in for contacts. People you don’t know at all get filtered when trying to contact you, but people you know tangentially or see once every few years are still reachable. I would have no reason to have this person’s number. There are plenty of people that I might contact about something but I wouldn’t have their number. I was also planning a surprise for my wife’s birthday and coordinating for her to have a girl’s night out with her friends. I wouldn’t have her friends numbers, but I was able to message them.

jfengel 7y ago

I have similar experiences with my theater troupe. It's very different from trying to market a national or global scale product. The market is small and hyper-local: people won't travel far for it, and only a small percentage of the community want it. They exist, but connecting with them is difficult without blanketing the area. Facebook serves the same niche as the local newspaper used to. Those newspapers are disappearing, and people pay little attention where they do. Everybody reads Facebook. (If the "kids" have moved away from it, well, they're not really our target market anyway.)

oska 7y ago
> Everybody reads Facebook. No they don't. Far from it. > Those newspapers are disappearing, and people pay little attention where they do. Local newspapers are coming back. There are at least three glossy free newspapers where I live (published weekly or monthly) that are packed full of local advertising and local news stories, local identity profiles, etc.
- thfuran 7y ago
  >No they don't. Far from it. That's technically correct but some 1.6 billion active daily users is kind of a big deal. "Everybody Uses facebook" is about as close accurate as you're going to get for an "Everybody does X" claim this side of "eats".

Skunkleton 7y ago

Individuals don’t need Facebook. Once people realize that, businesses won’t need them either.

catacombs 7y ago

> Everyone likes to say they don't use Facebook, but they do. Or at least 10 people they know do. I can confirm there are certainly people who don't use Facebook. I'm one of them and don't have any regrets dropping the platform years ago. It's just a boomer-meme-filled wasteland now.

smbowner 7y ago
Do you use any FB properties?
- catacombs 7y ago
  Zero. No FB, no Instagram, no WhatsApp.

forgotmypw 7y ago

The times I've found someone's identified belongings and successfully returned them, it was through Facebook.

themagician 7y ago

Facebook is a really great platform for getting clicks and likes. But most traffic is fake or garbage. Locally things look a little better as long as you aren’t in a metro that is dominated with bogus traffic. Works great for small business outside of major metro areas.

dwild 7y ago

> When I ran an escape room business, my fill-rate on weekends was typically dependent on whether or not I was spending money on Facebook. Google ads were second. It's funny because I was going to comment on that about the escape room of my SO and about how Facebook in her case was quite ineffective. I was taking care of her campaigns because she isn't tech savvy at all. I was spending 150$ a month on Facebook and the same amount on Google Adword, but we had a much better return on Google. There wasn't much advertising for escape room on Facebook for our area either, so that may explain why. There's quite a bit of them on Google Ads, but we only have ads on Google Adword for now. I'm not the best in advertising though and didn't spend that much time on it, so we could most probably optimize that quite a bit and maybe then Facebook could be better. We are exclusively on Google now and I did optimize it a bit to reach 4.75% CTR. I have an hard time tracking correctly the conversion with Resova (we are going to migrate out of them too, so I won't spend too much time on it either) so for now CTR is good enough.

kelnos 7y ago
This raises an interesting question for me: how do people find real-life things on the internet? If I want to find an escape room near me, I'll do a web search, or possibly open Google Maps on my phone and search for it. It wouldn't even occur to me to use Facebook for this (granted, I've been off FB for a year now, with an account open just for event invitations, so I may not be typical). Do people actually type searches to find things off-internet into FB's search box? Or is the advertising "discovery" more organic, in that escape room ads are just showing up in people's FB timeline or alongside unrelated Google searches (or on sites that display Google ads), and people think "oh, neat, I like escape rooms, I should try this one"?
- dwild 7y ago
  > how do people find real-life things on the internet? Originally I was planning to put them all on Facebook because I was expecting our market to be there (young adult who want to do something with friends). I was only taking ads on Google because even with the exact name, the result was too far. I was planning to remove it but as the CPC was much lower than on Facebook, I kept it with a few dollars per day. > I'll do a web search, or possibly open Google Maps on my phone and search for it. That what seems to be happening. Google Maps is one of our best source of conversion. During the first 12 months my SO asked most people where they found the escape room and a majority were from Google Maps. On Google My Business their stats show that in the past 30 days it was displayed 20k times, which is quite good. The CTR isn't amazing but it's still something and the number of calls is actually not too bad considering that I don't expect most people to use the call button of Google Maps to book. I'll probably try to pay for ads on Google Maps and Waze soon.

qroshan 7y ago

Well, why would you want to listen to arm-chair-experts who have ZERO skin in the game and likes to play "My Life is so good. Let's manufacture some persecution outrage so that I can yell"

holler 7y ago

So then how did these types of businesses survive pre-facebook?

0xffff2 7y ago
Were escape rooms even a thing pre-Facebook? They seem like a distinctly 21st century business to me.
saalweachter 7y ago
So long ago, in the dark days before 1991, bloggers would send their blog posts to centralized publishers who would collect all of these posts together and print them on big sheets of paper every morning that they would bundle together and sell for a nominal fee to the blogers' followers. Because the subscribers weren't willing to pay the full cost of producing these papers, the publishers would let local business owners pay them to include their own blog posts advertising their business. The people reading these papers each day would learn about local businesses and events from these advertisements.
analyst74 7y ago
Escape rooms were invitation-only back then, and most did not get out.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

justanothersys 7y ago

Makes sense, as Facebook’s interface is designed just like an escape room.