Glend Article

Making Money With Facebook - Chapter 5: Recent Facebook Changes

Author: glend

Introduction

As we have already established, until only one year ago, Facebook was still a relatively exclusive closed community, one that was principally focused on college and high school students, particularly in the USA.

Over the course of the past year, Facebook has therefore been making some very dramatic changes to the way that it operates. Some of the changes have been popular whilst others have been less so, but the one thing that is beyond question is that all of the changes have substantively altered the way that the Facebook community works.

Several of the changes that Facebook have introduced have been unpopular with existing community members, and have consequently brought the ownership of the website into conflict with many of the more outspoken community members (of whom there are quite a significant number!)

What this has demonstrated is the fact that many Facebook members are very protective about their community, and do not like to feel that it is being ‘attacked’ even when the ones doing (what they see as) the attacking are the site owners!

You could compare this protective attitude to that of the apparent majority of the MySpace community, most of whom seem to care little for the quality or validity of either the site or the network itself.

Facebook members are, however, extremely defensive about what they believe to be ‘their’ community, and it seems to matter little who is posing the perceived threat.

If you are planning on using Facebook as a moneymaking resource, it is extremely important that you understand from the outset that Facebook community members are different.

They do seem to have an ingrained belief that ‘their’ community is different and somehow better than others like MySpace.

And what this means for you as a marketer should not be underestimated. That is, given the apparently rebellious nature of most Facebook community members it seems unlikely that they will be particularly welcoming to anybody brandishing an overtly commercial message in their face.

There is also some evidence which we will return to later that would suggest that the majority of Facebook community members also have a fairly high opinion of their own self-worth, and that of their aspirations and principles.

No marketer who wants to make any kind of significant marketing impact within the Facebook community should choose to ignore any of these factors, as doing so will almost certainly doom your efforts to failure.

In other words, if you’re planning to promote and sell through the Facebook social network community, you must try to understand the people that you will be dealing with if you want to give yourself any chance of success.

Up until a year ago, Facebook was effectively a private online members club, and the majority of members in that club were all folks who had enjoyed higher levels of education.

Thus, a significant percentage of Facebook members are still highly educated and highly critical individuals, endowed with both the ability and strength of character to question decisions that they do not necessarily agree with.

Whilst the numbers of new members joining Facebook on a daily basis is certainly changing this demographic, nevertheless, at this moment, your ‘average’ Facebook community member whom you might envision turning into a customer is not going to be the easiest or most straightforward person to deal with and sell to, as Mark Zuckerberg has already found out!

News & Mini-Feeds

Back in September of 2007, Facebook launched the first of many changes that they were making to their community site.

At this point, they launched the News and Mini-Feeds services, which they obviously believed would provide valuable new resources to community members.

Unfortunately, however, many members did not agree that these new services were valuable!

Hence, there were many new member groups that sprang up on the Facebook site, all of which were established to protest against these decisions.

So, what was it about the News and Mini-Feeds concept that did so much to anger the community members?

Part of the problem seems to be that, coming so relatively late into the social networking ‘mass movement’, Facebook appear to be trying to do too much, too quickly.

And they are doing this with a group of users who somehow feel that this is their community, a group who are, moreover, generally well educated and fiercely independent.

At the same time, Facebook have continued working on the basic premise that most of their members are using the community to network with people that they have already met (and perhaps lost touch with) or current real life friends.

Therefore, the guys behind Facebook seemed to assume that every community member would be happy for everything that they did within the community to be reported to their peers.

This is, unfortunately, just not the case.

This is where the BIG mistake lies, and this is the point that it is critical to understand as a marketer, as it is a lesson that could be very expensive for you to learn for yourself.

For example, the basic idea of the Mini-Feeds is that they provide a constant feed of latest news to each and every member’s profile homepage.

This feed is drawn from several sources, so that everything that anyone in any group that you are a member of does is reported on your profile page. And, in one way or another, this has managed to annoy just about every Facebook member.

Every time a member of your peer group does something within their own Facebook ‘space’, all members of all of their groups get told about it.

What do Facebook members think of this?

Many of them have hated it, asking, for example, that Facebook gets rid of:

‘those terrible Mini-Feeds in our profiles, because this… lets EVERYONE see every little thing we’re doing, which is… for stalkers. Where did our privacy go?’

Similarly, Facebook claim that they will watch the information that is being fed in through the mini-feed to your profile page, and from that, they will figure out the kind of things that a member is interested in. Then, they will pull other ‘similar’ stories from the site and put those in your mini-feed as well.

A great idea, you may think, especially from a marketing point of view. Perhaps for example, this might present a way of beginning to present some form of promotional message to members via the mini-feeds.

Whilst in theory, that might work, in practice, it does not seem that likely. For example, from the same ‘protest group’ as the quote above, here is an idea of the general opinion of such information. Facebook

‘bombards us with information we don’t want to know (and) makes Facebook about as ugly as MySpace.’

So, granted, finding a way of getting your message into a constant information feed that automatically ‘lands’ in peoples profile or on their homepage sounds like it could be the perfect ‘smart’ way of promoting within the Facebook community.

But, the truth is that Facebook just does not work that way, principally because the community members would never allow it to do so, and I suspect that, unless you were very smart indeed, all it would get you would be a whole lot of complaints and trouble.

Banner Ads

As can be seen from the last screenshot, and the one below:

Facebook does offer the ability to place banner advertising in various locations on the site.

You may also note from the two examples shown that both for educational institutions, and, given the nature of the community, these are the banners that are very probably the most effective within the Facebook site.

This is because the average consumers in general suffer from a least some degree of ‘Banner blindness’.

That is, most website viewers who are confronted with banner advertising tend to skip straight past it almost without noticing its existence.

This is a widely accepted phenomenon for all types of businesses who are nowadays advertising online, and would certainly not be limited to the Facebook site.

Nevertheless, given that we have already conclusively established that the average Facebook community member is likely to be somewhat anti-establishment and ‘feisty’, the chances of commercial banner advertising being successful on such a website would, I suggest, be almost zero.

It is this reason that only a handful of commercial banners appear on the Facebook community site, and that the vast majority that do appear are for more community orientated organizations like universities and colleges.

Nevertheless, even universities and colleges must justify the money they spend on advertising, and, therefore, it is reasonable to assume that they must get some kind of return from their Facebook advertising efforts.

I would strongly suspect that they do not get many direct signups from such banner advertising (nor do they expect to either), but it would certainly help to establish their name and ‘brand’ awareness.

Given that statistically, there are still significant percentages of Facebook users who are high-school students, it clearly makes sense for colleges and universities to get their names in front of the students as often as possible.

Whilst this is unlikely to convince them to choose one university or college over another (has anybody ever chosen one university over another purely on the basis of advertising?) it does nevertheless help to create an overwhelmingly positive image for the educational institution in question.

You, however, are less concerned with image and far more concerned with sales. This kind of banner advertising on the Facebook site is unlikely to be particularly successful at the latter, and I would therefore suggest you leave it to the educational centers to whom such advertising seems to have some real value.

Pay Per Click Advertising

In November, 2007, Facebook launched what was claimed to be their answer to Google ‘AdWords’ Pay Per Click advertising program. Facebook call their advertising ’social ads’.

In case you are unfamiliar with the concept, Pay Per Click advertising (sometimes known as PPC) is nowadays a business model offered by many online advertising companies. There is little doubt however that Google AdWords is still the premier service in the market.

Before the advent of PPC advertising, traditional advertising whether online or off was all about eyeballs, and more specifically the number of them that you could encourage to look at your ad.

Thus it was that in most circumstances an advertiser’s only option was to pay for their advertisement to be shown either online, or offline via TV, in a magazine or journal, or even (heard) on a radio commercial.

And, no matter how many or how few people actually looked at your advertisement, you would still be charged exactly the same amount of money for it to ‘run’.

Pay Per Click advertising, and more specifically the AdWords program, changed that picture for ever as far as online advertising was and is concerned.

With PPC advertising, you will only ever pay when a potential customer acts upon seeing your advert.

In many ways, it could be argued that AdWords gave strength back to the advertisers by enabling them to pay for only those advertisements that drew a response (in this case, a click on the advert that took the interested party through to a particular website).

AdWords, however, was even smarter than this may at first appear.

This was because all AdWords advertisements are created around keywords that the advertiser best felt represented the product or service that they were trying to promote or sell.

If, for example, an AdWords advertiser was looking to promote a dog training e-book, then they would advertise using the phrase ‘dog training’ in their ad headline.

The AdWords program would then pick up on this keyword laden headline, and make sure that that advert only appeared on websites that were dog focused.

Thus, the people who would visit the website where the ad appeared would be dog lovers. It therefore follows that these site visitors represent the perfect potential customer for the advertisers business.

Particularly in the early days, therefore, the AdWords advertising model was stunningly successful.

Not only was it the most targeted advertising available but it only cost a few pennies when someone clicked on an ad as well.

Hence, Pay Per Click was a huge success for Google (one of the principal reasons, in fact, that they are now so successful), and therefore many competing PPC businesses were spawned.

Now, Facebook have entered the market with their ‘Social Ads’ campaign.

So, let’s next look at the new social ads advertising model, and consider what advantages or disadvantages it may have.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 24th, 2008 at 9:09 pm and is filed under Work At Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.