One last comment on Facebook and then we’ll move on to more pressing problems like growing tomatoes and keeping the squirrels off the peaches. My favorite podcaster, who goes by the initials KMO, interviewed contrarian journalist and advertising consultant B.J. Mendelson for episode 524 of the C-Realm podcast. In the interview Mendelson addresses one of the concerns that many of us face in our relationship with Facebook, namely that we have to be on it in order to promote our business or non-profit. Mendelson reminds us that Facebook is selling an advertising medium and that Mark Zuckerberg and other social media moguls might just be exaggerating its actual effectiveness.
Any of you who administrate a Facebook page for a business or non-profit will know that unless you pay, Facebook’s algorithm will bury your posts. Some other points Mendelson makes in the interview:
- A 1% click through rate on a paid post is often as good as it gets.
- Eighty percent of Facebook users are outside of the U.S. If you’re a local business, like say a plant nursery, what good is paying to reach someone in Latvia?
- Bots equal 60% of internet traffic (something to think about when looking at your stats).
- What happens if you rely on Facebook as a platform for your business and, like so many other internet companies of the past, Facebook goes out of business?
To illustrate how social media companies exaggerate their advertising power Mendelson offers a personal example. He has 700,000 Twitter followers. When he sent out a tweet about his new book he sold, not hundreds or thousands of copies, but exactly 28. A tweet to his 700,000 Twitter followers asking for a donation to a breast cancer charity netted just $1. While acknowledging that social media can, occasionally, be an effective advertising medium, for most of us it’s probably a big waste of time.
If you listen to the end of KMO’s interview you’ll get a code to download a free copy of Mendelson’s book, Social Media is Bullshit.