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If We're All So Darn Sick of You, Facebook, Why Can't We Quit You?

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If We're All So Darn Sick of You, Facebook, Why Can't We Quit You? SUMMARY If We're All So Darn Sick of You, Facebook, Why Can't We Quit You? A Few Theories About The Social Network's Apparent Endurance By: Simon Dumenco Published: June 10, 2013 0share this page Kelsey Dake Facebook is one of the digital world's great shape-shifters -- it's endlessly changed its user interface, its business strategy and (notoriously) its privacy policies over the years -- but one thing that's remained constant: We all love to complain about it. In fact, hinting at, or outright predicting, the eventual demise of Facebook has become something of an obsession for a lot of the media. Business Insider, for instance, recently ran a post titled "You Have to Believe This Chart Makes Mark Zuckerberg Slightly Anxious." The graphic came from Kleiner Perkins' Mary Meeker and it plots the results of a survey of 2,000 social-media users, age 12 to 64, who were asked in 2011 and then again in 2012 which social-media products they use. YouTube, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, Foursquare and even MySpace all gained. But Facebook actually shrunk a bit. Though surveys about self-reported media usage obviously should be taken with a grain of salt, the chart still would seem to jibe with data Nielsen released last month, which said that Facebook shed more than 10 million U.S. users from March 2012 to March 2013 -- going from 153 million monthly uniques to 142 million. But wait! For every Facebook-is-in-trouble story, there is, of course, a counter-narrative. As The Wall Street Journal's Tom Gara wrote in response to the Nielsen figures, "While 1 some web traffic numbers might be down, it's a mistake to read this as a peak in usage. The company is undergoing an amazing boom in mobile usage." And the revenue is following. As my colleague Cotton Delo reported last month, 30% of Facebook's first-quarter ad revenue came from mobile ads, up from 23% last quarter. The company pulled in $1.46 billion in revenue last quarter, vs. $1.06 billion in the same quarter a year ago. So, basically: Facebook usage in the U.S. might be down, or maybe it's just flat, but mobile is growing, and revenue is up. Which means, what, exactly? What's missing from our big-picture understanding of Facebook? Some thoughts: We don't have access to the right data, really. Speaking of self-reporting, Facebook itself claims "1.11 billion monthly active users as of March 2013." That, of course, includes users who visit Facebook as infrequently as once every four weeks or so -- the kind of users who think of Facebook as less of an immersive hangout and more as a sort of monolithic directory that's occasionally useful for tracking people down (because "everyone's on Facebook"). A utility, of sorts. Facebook's other most recent self-reported stat -- "655 million daily active users on average in March 2013" -- offers a little more insight, but not much. Mainly because it doesn't break that number down country-by-country (though it does concede that "79% of our daily active users are outside the U.S. and Canada"). And also because "daily active" ... well, that covers everyone from the status-updating, picture-posting addict to the time- strapped user who, say, quickly checks her Facebook inbox every morning as a matter of habit. Facebook stalks people into being "active." You know the Morrissey song "The More You Ignore Me, the Closer I Get"? That's Facebook's modus operandi. If you don't log in for a while, Facebook guilts you into visiting with its vaguely desperate "You have notifications pending" emails, which name- check friends and colleagues who have "posted statuses, photos and more on Facebook." In one recent two-week period, for example, during which I stayed away from Facebook, I got four such emails (on May 19, 23, 28 and 29). In essence, Facebook is using the oldest trick in the digital-marketing book -- email -- to keep those users who are sick of Facebook from abandoning it entirely. Facebook's big mobile push lets it be a "must-spend" in a whole new way. But for how long? "You have to be on Facebook." Self-appointed social-media and marketing "experts" still say that sort of thing, even though it's increasingly clear that Facebook is helpful for certain kinds of products and pretty useless for others. 2 There's still a lot of experimental marketing spend flooding into social media, but by becoming, almost overnight, a company with significant mobile revenue, Facebook can now also partake of the ongoing mobile-marketing frenzy/paranoia. Remember, before mobile, before Facebook, there were marketing "experts" who were saying, "You have to be on MySpace." And to rewind to the dawn of digital-marketing time, in the '90s their forebears were saying, "You have to be on AOL." AOL posted some amazing numbers during its go-go years because a lot of marketers really believed the hype about advertising on AOL being almost mandatory. Until, you know, they didn't. These days, if you're a CMO who has been questioning the "You have to be on Facebook" dogma, well, there's a new faith -- "You have to be on mobile" -- and continuing to spend on the newly mobile-first Facebook satisfies that imperative. For the time being, at least. STUDY: News Feed Page Post Ads Deliver 26X More ROI, 20X Greater CTR Than Facebook Right-Hand-Side Ads David Cohen on June 17, 2013 3:43 PM Page post ads in Facebook‘s News Feed are becoming the ad unit of choice for marketers on the social network, mainly due to their return on investment performance, according to a study released Monday by Facebook advertising platform Nanigans. Nanigans said advertisers in its study used its ROI-based bidding and optimization algorithms to include News Feed page post link and page post photo ads, as well as right- hand-side domain ads, in their campaigns. The company added that its results were based on some 150 million impressions across multiple verticals and included purchases made up to seven days after the ads ran. 3 The study found that: Page post link ads delivered a 53 percent ROI. Page post photo ads delivered a 24 percent ROI. Page post ad units delivered an ROI 26 times higher than right-hand-side ad units. Page post photo ads delivered a 37 percent higher click-through rate than page post link ads and 20 times the CTR of right-hand-side ads. The cost per click for page post photo ads was 17 percent lower than the CPC for page post link ads and right-hand-side ads. Page post link ads delivered a 30 percent higher action rate than page post photo ads, as well as a 55 percent higher rate of purchasing users (the rate of purchasing users were 61 percent higher than for right-hand-side ads). Nanigans concluded: We‘re seeing that marketers are increasingly shifting their advertising spend to page post ads in News Feed, because they can deliver a higher ROI than standard domain ads on the right-hand side. The largest (by image size) ad unit in News Feed, page post link ads are designed for direct response, with two clickable areas leading users to an external domain. While this ad unit had a higher CPC and lower CTR as compared to page post photo ads, page post link ad units delivered a high action rate and purchasing user rate, resulting in a higher ROI relative to page post photo ads and domain ads. Page post link ads typically perform well for lead-generation campaigns and are effective in converting users off site. Page post photo ads are designed to capture attention with larger, more engaging photos, creating a seamless experience between paid, owned and earned media. Our study shows that this ad format demonstrated a higher CTR at a lower CPC resulting in a higher ROI than ads on the right-hand side. We concluded that page post photo ads are highly effective for promoting specific products for ecommerce companies such as fashion and home furnishing retailers, as well as mobile apps. Brands on Facebook: Have you found similar results with News Feed page post ads? 4 RELATED STORIES Facebook Target Ads Using Offline Purchasing Posted by Atish Ranjan on May 14, 2013 It is been nearly some days since Facebook unveiled its absolutely new feature known as ―Partner categories‖. This feature works in manner that is based on your past purchases that is the kind of things you bought in the past including the ones you did offline. 5 That means that if you bought a pair of jeans from a section stock up in your area, then you might see a lot of ads based on the categories of pants and jeans on Facebook. So basically, all Facebook is trying to achieve is target advertisements using offline purchases as well. The feature ―People categories‖ works in accordance with the huge information giving customer data corporations such as Acxiom, DataLogix and Epsilon. There are the companies that keep track of your online activities and the kind of purchasing you did. The feature partner categories matches the information that is gotten or generated by the social networking medium with the data from the data corporations for making records on its users. Facebook then makes specific divisions of the specific people and create specific categories such as people who are heavy purchasers of chocolates etc.
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