Skip to content
Forrester is global research and advisory firm and someone that many businesses listen to. They wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg. The open letter talks about how Facebook collected more than $4 billion in advertising revenues last year as almost every big company is now using Facebook as part of their marketing strategy. Even though they are using Facebook marketing, many are not finding it to be a successful strategy. To get an idea of how they came up with this information, Forrester surveyed 395 eBusiness executives and marketers at large companies in the US, Canada, and the UK. The image below shows what they thought of Facebook marketing.
Facebook is trailing behind all the other digital marketing opportunities and Forrester outlines a couple of strong reasons why. They speak first to the concept that Facebook does not focus enough on driving genuine engagement between companies and their customers. What they are referring to is that, on average, only 16% of a pages fans will actually see each brand’s posts. They also speak of how Facebook has done very little in the last 18 months to improve the tools that marketers use to help them manage and measure their pages.
Forrester then goes on to talk about how Facebook delivers tens of billions of display ads every day, but fewer than 15% utilize the growing social data to target relevant audiences. In addition the static-image ads do not make as big an impact per impression compared to the offerings of other sites. Many executives said that display ads that they could buy elsewhere were significantly more effective than what Facebook is offering and that made Facebook ads less valuable to them.
Forrester finishes off their open letter with some suggestions to that they think will help make Facebook a more valuable marketing strategy.
But what does that mean to a business currently using Facebook marketing or looking into it?
If you are wondering if you should advertise on Facebook, the first thing you should figure out is who your target audience is and what level of engagement are you wanting from them. Targeting people who are looking for a specific product that you provide should work well if you create Facebook landing pages for those ads to capture the like before driving them to your site. Capturing the like is the first step to building your brand’s presence with those individuals and people that connect with them.
To read the open letter yourself, please visit Forrester’s blog
Written By: Doyle Clemence – SMM
