Undoubtedly one of the biggest companies in the world, especially from a revenue perspective, Facebook has also created the illusion that businesses can leverage their platform to generate significant sales.
While there are companies benefiting to the tune of six figures thanks to Facebook’s advertising platform, the reality is that businesses spend considerably more on the platform that they actually make back.
This can be due to a number of reasons, though quite often it is a combination of a few. When Facebook first made it possible for businesses to start advertising, clever marketers were able to quickly take advantage of their algorithms so that they could specifically target the potential customers that they wanted to.
However, as more and more businesses started to make significant amounts of money from their user base, Facebook began gradually tweaking the algorithms that powered its advertising platform.
It meant that it became harder for businesses to effectively hit their target audience and subsequently had to spend more on the adverts that they created, though even there are no guarantees.
Every advert that is created has an objective associated to it that an advertiser has to choose which is effectively for a target customer to take some kind of action. This could either be a like, share or conversion which is what advertisers ultimately aim for.
With so much competition now from other advertisers, getting it right and being able to differentiate yourself is harder than ever before and despite a large user base, there are no guarantees.
While not exactly a saturated advertising platform, Facebook is certainly becoming much harder for businesses to hit the right customers through their paid advertising campaigns, especially if they also don’t know what they are doing.
With the social media giant also continuously changing its advertising algorithms, you need to be completely on top of what is happening as well. Getting absolute value from a Facebook advertising campaign should be a priority for businesses.
When posting a Facebook ad as well, there is also no certainty that it will be approved. The social media company’s advert policy has strict regulations that advertisers have to adhere to which means you could spend a long time (the process can be time consuming) creating and then find that your advert isn’t approved.
Furthermore, the approval policy for every advert that is submitted can take up to 24 hours to be approved, which means that you could lose out on some peak advertising time if it does take this long.
Should you want to contest a decision by Facebook to disapprove an advert, the appeals and review process can take a further 24 hours, which can mean your are losing out on potential sales.
Are there alternative solutions?
With the PPC form of advertising becoming even more competitive and harder to master, businesses are starting to look elsewhere for other methods of customer acquisition that provide much better value for money.
Savvy technology companies in the Mar Tech niche are starting to capitalise on this, with many identifying gaps in the market to satisfy a fundamental B2B need.
Snizl allows businesses to easily create effective competitions and offers and post them to its already active and qualified community of buyers, with each customer having an interest in deals that companies post.
With businesses able to enjoy a non obligation 30 day free trial it is a great opportunity to see first hand how much more effective this is than the paid search method.