Facebook Advertising Pros and Cons.
Should You Advertise on a Social Media Platform with Great Controversies?
You may have heard of the Cambridge incident when Facebook was hacked and lost tons of private information from millions of Facebook users. There have been many other articles and news stories that have come out about the discrepancies and downright illegal activities of Facebook and social media. Whether it’s Facebook participating with foreigners wreaking havoc on our shores or people conducting sex trafficking using Facebook as its medium, Facebook is rife with problems!
This article isn’t so much about how to use Facebook advertising as it is about the medium itself, and some considerations about how is it going to continue going forward.
Should you use Facebook advertising to reach out to people when there are so many controversies associated with it?
If you’re a baby boomer like me and fed up with Facebook’s monopoly, you’re probably wanting a great comeuppance” story! That hard lesson for Facebook is showing up in the form of sites like bereal.com. Be Real and many others are starting to communicate with generation Z on a smaller and more authentic level than Facebook or Instagram or any others are doing, including TikTok at the time of this writing. Be Real is much like how Facebook started in the first place – small group communication. But while there may be other purposes behind sites like bereal.com, they are sweeping across our generation Z in growing numbers as people of that generation bail out of Facebook advertising and other older social media platforms.
Aside from Facebook’s financial advertising losses of late and all the other controversies stemming from megalomania leadership and a conglomerate that should’ve been broken up long ago, Facebook advertising is a risky proposition. Why?
Number one: you will get associated with the Facebook issues.
Number two: Facebook ad manager is difficult to use and untrustworthy in its results. Sure, there may be many people making big money on Facebook. But by percentage, they pay a lot more money to advertise on Facebook than any other social media platform in the world today!
Facebook seems to have a model of entrepreneurial success for the first two years for a company or person and then costs keep rising for the next years for the same advertiser. These are just my observations, but we can back them up with many stories about the lack of success and/or early success and then later increasing costs for many companies. You probably have your own stories. But back to Facebook’s functional problems as a platform.
Facebook or “Meta” is currently way off their predictions for ad revenues per eMarketer.com. They were supposed to be at $167 billion in ad revenue by October, 2022. But, the poor dears… they only made $132 billion in ad revenue by October end. That’s an extreme missing of the mark by more than 20% from their predictions. They never used to miss their revenue predictions in the past. It’s just that now, people are waking up and realizing they need to get off this platform.
It’s the old “general store” of the 19 century. You might remember how companies used to run their own general store for their workers and make them buy other things at the company general store? Yeah. It’s time for the Standard Oil solution to happen to Facebook. Break them up! Facebook doesn’t really care about the U.S. since it only represents 10% of their gross revenues. But they are having troubles in Australia and in Europe and missing the mark in those countries as well.
You should, we think, stay with a platform that has been proven, solid and reliable for over a century. Of course, we’re speaking about broadcast radio!
With over 83 million Americans listening to radio in all its forms each month, it’s a good bet for a solid advertising channel/network that won’t let you down and will deliver results! If you have questions about any of this, give us a call at our number – 800-208-7154 or fill out the contact form.
By Sean Pearce and Pete Miller
