Facebook ‘is still failing marketers’
Facebook is “still failing” marketers, with brands increasingly believing it won’t ever live up to its promise and become a valuable marketing channel, according to Forrester’s latest criticism of the social network.
In a blog post, Forrester claims that marketers could only reach 6 per cent of their fans organically through Facebook in February, down from 16 per cent in October according to global data from Ogilvy. For brand pages with more than 500,000 fans that number was 2 per cent in February, down from 4 per cent five months before.
Forrester’s vice president and principal analyst Nate Elliot, claims that brands are “disillusioned” with Facebook and increasingly focusing their social efforts on other sites, such as Twitter and LinkedIn.
He also raises concerns over the rise of “fake” fans, accounts that don’t interact on the site beyond “liking” brand pages, claiming that many marketers have concluded that Facebook is encouraging them to pay for ads that don’t actually reach their customers.
“All marketers want Facebook to live up to its promise and to become a valuable marketing channel. They just don’t believe it will ever happen,” he adds.
The blog post follows a report by Forrester four months ago that pointed to Facebook’s failings as a marketing platform, in particular its reliance on display ads and simplistic targeting, rather than social ads.
In response to the report, Facebook says it has previously explained its position on fake likes, saying that it has increased focus on abuse from such accounts by implementing automated and manual systems to block them. The firm also says it has plenty of support from the marketing industry, counting more than 1 million active advertisers and “powerful statements” from brand marketers on the benefits of using social and scale to deliver business results.
Facebook cites a recent Ford campaign for its EcoSport model, which drove 500 in-store sales of limited edition cars across 11 markets via the social network, hitting its target and leading the car marque to plan another similar campaign that will launch in May.
In its most recent quarterly report, the social network also hailed the success of its Promoted Posts service, which it claims 500,000 pages have used, of which 30 per cent belong to brands and 70 per cent go on to use it again. The social network’s ad revenues increased to $2.34bn for the three months ended December, up 76 per cent year on year.