Facebook is a scam for businesses!
By: Brendan Fitzpatrick
So I’ve decided to open up several social media accounts from Facebook to Instagram to Tumbler, Pinterest, Twitter and a few others.. basically to “figure them out” and see how I can use them to my advantage. I’m not saying that most social networks are “good” for marketing or for a local business or fortune 500 company but this review is focused on Facebook and the pros and cons that I have come across.
It was a slow start, I first created a business page and posted several posts without any followers .. very frustrating at the least.. but I quickly ‘Boosted’ my posts with varying degrees of success. I finally figured out my audience and I was being rated at “10” by Facebook for ‘quality of Ad & targeting’ .. I forgot the buzzwords they used but they basically said that I was in the top percentage of ads vs. cost of advertising (ie. maximizing the number of Likes I was getting per Ad). I was on top of the world! Holy cr@p, I figured something out!
Low and behold, a few weeks goes by and I figured that I would try to take advantage of my new found audience by posting a new article from my site.. 2 days goes by and I check my stats only to see that it had only reached 14 people (remember, I’ve just spent a few hundred dollars to “buy” 1,500 likes)… surely something must be wrong or broken with my account.. After all, why would I pay to build an audience that I cannot reach?
So it ends up, the audience that I “purchased” – I can “reach” if I pay the same amount to contact them.. .what does this mean? I’m paying at least double to communicate to the members that liked me. Think of it this way, your friends on facebook are “Free”.. but your clients or audience will cost you a few hundred dollars to gain BUT in order to communicate to them you will have to pay again – or 2x the cost of acquistion.. I called Google out on this 5+ years ago (Google Adwords) but Facebook is 2x worse, they make you pay to acquire connections and then again to communicate to those very same connection.. WTF?
I will make a prediction that Facebook will either get busted for misrepresentation of services OR their advertising clients will catch on enough at some point where their stock takes a significant hit, regardless – I promise you that their Advertising services are not much more than a scam that will be exposed.
Bottom line, do lots of controlled testing without letting the Big Guys eat you up.. at this point using Facebook for business purposes feels like dealing with someone from someone in Nigeria! Stay away!