Not getting any value from Facebook

Am I not doing it right?

[jmorgan]

I'm kind of wondering why I even have a page on Facebook. Apart from the ego boost from getting a bunch of likes and wanting to have some, any, presence on the platform, I really don't see any value in it.

At first, I thought it would be a great way to make announcements to my users, then I realized I would have to pay to reach any more than 5 or 10% of them. And I don't even have that many announcements to make anyway.

Is there actually some feature of Facebook that I'm not utilizing which would actually make being on it worthwhile? Because at the moment, it just seems like I'm just on it for the sake of being on it.

I find Twitter to a bit better as a platform for reaching users, personally.

[NickMNS]

My experience mirrors yours.

[keyplyr]

Along with Elon Musk, Cher and thousands of others, I just removed my company presence at FB (still have a personal account for friends & family.)

I don't want my customers to associate my company branding with the privacy crimes that FB is doing.

Also, my company's FB page was sometimes ranking higher than my actual page in some Google searches.

[RhinoFish]

You lost me at Twitter. :-)

[Stanllow]

Just do the right thing on Facebook and you will be running to the bank like a lottery winner. When I worked for a digital marketing agency in Northampton, I came across many individuals and businesses with the same mindset about Facebook not being to deliver.

When one does it and does it wrong, she may start to feel dishearted. Facebook is an excellent platform for reaching targeted personae and in many instances, it has delivered ROI than Adwords. I have done and I am still doing it.

[scottb]

My clients have a wide range of experience with Facebook even when they followed some of the same basic rules about when and how to post.

When I looked closely at the numbers, I found that the business category was a big factor in whether they succeeded or failed. For example, newspapers do fantastically well while travel and retail struggle a lot.

I don't think it's a matter of whether or not you do Facebook as it is how much time you should put into it.

FYI, none of my clients do well with Twitter. They get good responses ON Twitter, but the responses don't translate into much value.

[keyplyr]

Without buying ads, FB can still send thousands of daily visitors to your site. Most are just curious, but many can become valuable repeat traffic.

• Create images about 600pxl x 600pxl that represent some of your web pages or articles.

• Install Og code [ogp.me] in the HEAD section of your HTML markup using that image and write title and description.

• Join topic related FB Groups. Join a lot of them. Participate. Make friends. Comment on posts. Like posts by others.

• After you've established yourself as an active member and not just a spammer, start to post in each of these groups, a couple times a week at first. Later you can post more often. Be careful not to post too fast. Wait at least 60 seconds between posts or the FB anti-bot system will catch you and suspend your posting rights.

The Og images will automatically link to the target page and supply a title and description that you've included in the code. These posts look nice and the better the image, the more traffic they will generate, but the target page will need to give the visitor something of interest or the group will quickly label you as a spammer, so write good content at your site :)

Sometimes it may be necessary to load the Og image into FB's cache system. Use this tool. Run it a couple times: [developers.facebook.com...]

The Og images/code also works for Twitter, Google Plus and a few other SM sites.

Here's a similar tool to get Twitter to load the OG image: [cards-dev.twitter.com...]

[csdude55]

From my experience, nearly 100% of the clicks I get from Facebook are fraudulent.

I ran a paid ad awhile back, setting a budget of $2,000 to be spent over a few days. The site was for classified ads in North Carolina, and I set it to only target residents of North Carolina. At the time we had about 2,000 ads a day posted, so it was active site with plenty of content.

During the campaign I saw plenty of click-throughs to the homepage, but about 94% of them were a bounce... they went to the homepage, then immediately left without clicking to view a single category or ad. And not one of them signed up for a free account.

Later, after the campaign was complete, I looked through Analytics deeper and found that about 98% of the clicks came from California... specifically, the same town where Facebook was located!

It was an absolute waste of money, and to this day I'm convinced that Facebook had bots set up to create fake clicks on ads.

Now, I have it set so that users can share their listings to Facebook. I track how much traffic we sent to Facebook, and how much Facebook sends back to me in return.

So far, daily, I send about 20 times the number of clicks to them than they send to me. Which means that my users sharing links to my site helps Facebook a whole lot more than it helps me :-(

[Leosghost]

As an experiment, I set up a page for one of my businesses on facebook, I posted no content, no text, no images, zilch, it did not go "public"..Within 7 days facebook informed me that I had 42 followers.Leading me to conclude that..

a) facebook is populated by morons who will follow blank pages
b) facebook is populated by bots
c) facebook do not have even a passing acquaintance with the truth

or
d) facebook is a"mix of a, b and c

Never would I give facebook ( such an obvious scam, which will be exposed one day, and will die ) so much as a single centime of ad money for anything, none of my sites have any social buttons, business and organisations which require me to "interact" with them via facebook ( visit their page etc ) get their request consigned to the truncated cone icon or filing receptacle that has crumpled paper in it.

[tangor]

Like anything, you get out what you put in. Most times, however, what @lesoghost just posted is the reality. That said, some have seen strong revenue increases via fb, but most of those seem to be based on having a product, or a service, that is either unique or highly desired.

Me? I was among the first 10k who joined fb back when. Initially because of family all across the USA. I have out lived most of those (sad to say) and nowadays login about once a month. fb is not happy about that. I receive, on average, 100+ emails each month telling "this or that posted this or that and we miss you and these new friends, etc ad nauseum. I could kill the email feed, but why? This way I know what fb is doing without sharing anything else with a company that has serious PII security problems. As a NoScripter and fan of Ad Block Plus I'm not all that concerned with fb chasing me around the web. THIS IS A USERS REPORT...

As a webmaster, see my first statement.

[RhinoFish]

I get involved with a lot of tracking systems, most focus on post click (PC) tracking. It's easy enough to tag your FB links and view the outcomes in a purely PC platform like Analytics, but so few bother. Perspectives do differ from one advertiser to another, but when I ask "Besides FB, which of your other channels include Post View?", it can be compel many to look deeper.

[odysseus]

You should keep having your page. It doesn't cost you anything, and it probably doesn't harm you in any way. You never know, someone might share you or find you in a search or whatever...

That said, I think the organic game is pretty much dead on Facebook, and it's about 98% pay-to-play. Don't hold your breath waiting for traffic or profit from it if you don't pay for ads.

I like Twitter better too. They've recently started killing reach a bit as well, but it's still far from Facebook.