There has been a lot of skepticism from online media buyers about
Facebook and whether it holds its weight especially in comparison to search. To
date, I have never had any success come from advertising on Facebook. I think it’s all hype.
It reminds me of the days where we used to buy unused impressions on different IM clients for CPM’s that cost less than a dollar. I think social networking in general might engage the end user too much and I think the click-thrus that you do get are mostly accidental. Check out Facebook compares to other search engines below.
I compiled this data by only spending a couple thousand dollars on each source. I know that’s not enough data to make any conclusion but at the same time I’m not going to spend any more money on something that didn’t provide results. We spend about $100k a month with just Google alone. When I experiment with a new advertising vehicle I normally like to test based on 5k clicks.
So before completely giving up on Facebook, I decided to get spend a few hundred dollars as a test against our BOALT facebook page just to see if these would achieve better results. The click-thru ratio was high but not one person joined our page. Again, absolutely worthless.
This sparked my curiosity and I decided to run a poll on facebook to see how effective their ads were. Facebook only allowed me to spend $25 and that bought me 100 answers. Yes, I know that’s not enough to draw a conclusion but it was still fun. See the results below:
