Facebook's encouragement of businesses to build FB pages, then have their own customers like them on Facebook seemed like a win-win--a mutual leveraging of cross-engagement.

But, Facebook's later flipping the switch to make those businesses pay to reach their own customers was a completely underhanded bait-and-switch.

Still leaves a bad taste in my mouth all of these years later.

I absolutely agree.

Also, the 'find people by their likes' is just good in theory. All of your likes are going to be of people who share everything

They probably also have 1000+ friends, half of whom have hidden their activity because it's all spam

Yeah, this was not great. I worry Google might do something similar with email and their attempt to curate it with Inbox and the growth of ads in Gmail.

They have the ability to control access and marketers currently pay a known fixed or tiered price for sending email to somewhat reliably reach their full target list (minus bounces). I'm sure Google is salivating over turning that into a dynamic auction based model with them as the gate keeper of one of the most widespread and valuable email clients out there.

Hard lesson for companies that you need to own your subscribers, not lease them from twitter/facebook/instagram.

What's worse is that it's "buying" them (via hard-won marketing efforts), giving them to FB, then paying FB to lease them back.

But, of course, that wasn't the original deal--else no one would have signed up for it.

This is why I'm hesitant to switch my business Instagram account to be an official business page. I don't sell anything so the ecommerce/insight tools don't really appeal, but I can definitely see the future of having to "boost" posts to you followers.

But meanwhile Facebook users have proven to be completely unwilling to curate their own feed, so if Facebook didn't curate which pages you saw stuff from, everyone would leave Facebook because "it's all just ads".

This not the case at all. Forexample, there are cartoons that up very high in my feed because I click on them every day. If you something of quality that your users want, you don't have to pay to get to see. In fact they will share.

I've been running >$1M annually in ads on Facebook for real businesses (both B2B and B2c) to great success. They have a higher CAC than AdWords, but perform substantially better than display ads, and consistently bring in clients that are top of funnel, but turn out to be high quality.

It seems to be your business: https://www.survata.com/ ( no offence, i'm just carefull when it's someone's work, but you did mention it)

i'm curious about any real stats actually :) - Eg. http://www.denverpost.com/2012/07/03/gm-reconsiders-paid-fac...

I don't mind discussing it. It's not a secret, as anyone on Facebook could simply visit our website and look forward to a Facebook ad :)! I first started running large scale Facebook campaigns at another employer (b2c) in 2013, ran them until I left there in mid-2014, and after a bit of a step away from them while moving across the country and getting a new job, we've begun running them again. While I can't share specific stats, we've acquired real leads that have turned into customers at a cost that we're comfortable with right now. I'll admit that at a company with different unit economics and lifetime behavior, the calculus would be different, but my point was simply that Facebook ads do work for businesses, if not all businesses. Also, have to give Facebook credit for continually improving the product (though the Power Editor remains insanely frustrating and I'd do anything for an offline AdWords Editor for Facebook). If you'd like to discuss in more detail, shoot me an email and I'll answer any questions I can.

There is no point in acquiring page likes, for two reasons: first, as you mentioned, after you paid to acquire the like you'll still have to pay to reach those people with your campaign (organic reach is peanuts these days); second, targeting ads at fans rather than any other segmentation makes no difference for your campaign cost structure.

To be fair, all things being equal, Fans have better CPM than interest-based clusters ("people who like such pages and such topics") on average. But that's not a Facebook incentive, it's merely a statistical correlation between someone having liked your page and the likelihood of their reaction to your ads being positive (which drives the relevance score up, in turn bringing the CPM down). But you can find even better results with proper behavior-based targeting (in particular remarketing).

When I'm surveying the competition, net fan growth is a useful metric to keep in hand because it leaks information. High churn is indicative of sponsored content targeted towards fans only (which usually comes hand-in-hand with outdated content strategies such as increasingly like-bait content and equally distributed total engagement across many posts), while positive net fan growth can be coupled with total engagements and views and some qualitative observations in order to ballpark competitor's budget and broad-strokes strategy.

If I'm being honest, looking at the cost-effectiveness of both branding and performance campaigns on Facebook, it remains a secondary channel and gives no signs of ever meriting a prime role in my campaigns. Production costs, data lock-in opportunity costs and its highly kafkaesque tools and available metrics only make things worse.

In my years in advertising it's been repeatedly demonstrable that about every other DSP performs better than Facebook (across all industries and campaign goals I've worked with), whose only clear strength seems to be having massive inventory with a pretty decent coverage, making it a one-stop-shop for small and medium businesses and making itself a required line item in large companies media planning.

That's great for them, I'm sure, but they simply don't deliver as well as about anything else I work with, and that translates into a "when in doubt start by decreasing the Facebook budget and reallocating it somewhere else" pattern that you see everywhere. That may turn out to be a long term threat for them, I don't know. Their recent closing of FBX is telling: I for one had better results running Facebook campaigns through 3rd party DSPs than through Facebook itself, even at a premium on the CPM.

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edit. – I realize I mentioned CPM 3 times and no other metric, here's why: most Facebook optimizations involve finding the cheapest inventory that is on-target (for branding campaigns) or high-conversion (for performance campaigns). So trying to grok your campaign results always leads back to CPM, even though my job is usually to deliver something more useful to the client such as low CPA, high ROI or even additional reach with better CPP for their TVC campaign.

I wonder how much better performance they could deliver if they improved their attribution tools, ad interface, bid rules, etc.

Part of the problem is that if you do anything at scale with FB you really should be using a PMD. For many things the Ads Manager and Power Editor are just painful.

I'm also not in love with how conversions are tracked and optimized against in terms of how they try to lump everything possible in as a conversion to show a higher number and try to convince advertisers that all those components have equal value.

Running an FB campaign focused on performance is, like I said, a game of finding the lowest on-target/high-conversion CPM (conversely: finding your intended audience at its cheapest). It's not in Facebook's interest to disclose this information too easily, as part of their profit margin comes from squeezing campaign spread.

So my thinking here is that their tools are poor at performance optimization by design, so that we have to jump through hoops, experiment and throw money at different audience mixes in order to find just the right creative-segment-budget allocation. So I don't think that is headed to change so long as they are allowed to keep playing black box and walled garden.

I was astounded how easy it was to get better CPA/ROI running Facebook campaigns on, say, DBM or Criteo even at a premium on the CPM. It goes to show just how lacking their tools are in fast audience and creative optimization.

So there's definitely something to be said for tools that can optimize the best to deliver higher ROI despite higher CPMs.

That said, I'm not sure I fully agree on where FB's interests lie. They've come under a LOT of fire over the past couple of years for various things that people felt inflated the value of their inventory, and so helping advertisers prove they can drive more value and provide tools to help them scale more easily would all be things that should help their bottom line. Particularly when marketers have to make a budget allocation decision towards something that might be a bit more mid/bottom funnel like SEM.

So to compete for that same budget, they need to be competitive on all fronts, and right now they are not. Their margins might be higher from obfuscating some of these key insights that might let people trim the fat, but that needs to be weighed against potential lost revenue from advertisers who can't reach profitability quickly enough and stop advertising, or lost budget share from advertisers who shift it to other channels.

I don't have numbers on those hunches to back them up of course, but it just seems like a really poor long term decision to intentionally cripple your platform in such a way (and that is inherently different than just poor design or design geared to make it easy to spend).