Facebook is a scam for businesses!

By: Brendan Fitzpatrick

Google

So I’ve decided to open up several social media accounts from Facebook to Instagram to Tumbler, Pinterest, Twitter and a few others.. basically to “figure them out” and see how I can use them to my advantage. I’m not saying that most social networks are “good” for marketing or for a local business or fortune 500 company but this review is focused on Facebook and the pros and cons that I have come across.

It was a slow start, I first created a business page and posted several posts without any followers .. very frustrating at the least.. but I quickly ‘Boosted’ my posts with varying degrees of success. I finally figured out my audience and I was  being rated at “10” by Facebook for ‘quality of Ad & targeting’ .. I forgot the buzzwords they used but they basically said that I was in the top percentage of ads vs. cost of advertising (ie. maximizing the number of Likes I was getting per Ad). I was on top of the world! Holy cr@p, I figured something out!

Low and behold, a few weeks goes by and I figured that I would try to take advantage of my new found audience by posting a new article from my site.. 2 days goes by and I check my stats only to see that it had only reached 14 people (remember, I’ve just spent a few hundred dollars to “buy” 1,500 likes)… surely something must be wrong or broken with my account.. After all, why would I pay to build an audience that I cannot reach?

So it ends up, the audience that I “purchased” – I can “reach” if I pay the same amount to contact them.. .what does this mean? I’m paying at least double to communicate to the members that liked me. Think of it this way, your friends on facebook are “Free”.. but your clients or audience will cost you a few hundred dollars to gain BUT in order to communicate to them you will have to pay again – or 2x the cost of acquistion.. I called Google out on this 5+ years ago (Google Adwords) but Facebook is 2x worse, they make you pay to acquire connections and then again to communicate to those very same connection.. WTF?

I will make a prediction that Facebook will either get busted for misrepresentation of services OR their advertising clients will catch on enough at some point where their stock takes a significant hit, regardless – I promise you that their Advertising services are not much more than a scam that will be exposed.

Bottom line, do lots of controlled testing without letting the Big Guys eat you up.. at this point using Facebook for business purposes feels like dealing with someone from someone in Nigeria! Stay away!

 

 

Instagram, how to use it for marketing!

By: Brendan Fitzpatrick

Google

I’m fairly new to Instagram, been using it for 3 months now and I’m slowly figuring out how to take advantage of it as a top social media network. The follow may be obvious to some but for most people it may open your eyes to how to take advantage of it from a marketing perspective!

I won’t go into all the details which you’ll find on many other sites but I’ll summarize them here and then dig into the good details:

1. Always make sure your pictures are good quality. At the time of this article pics should be 1080 x 1080 pixels.
2. Make sure your pics are interesting and have a Theme. This will draw interest and a niche following.
3. Make sure you are not posting Ads. If you are not offering information or creative Pics then who would you expect to follow you?
4. Always use effective #hashtags. Do your research!

There are a few dozen other key areas to focus on for maximizing your experience on Instagram but here is one area that you won’t find much information on the internet:

Find your proper Audience! I know this sounds like common sense but is it really? Here’s an example, if you are selling T-shirts then think to yourself how you would hashtag you posts. Most people would think the following list is highly targeted:

#tshirts #tshirt #tee #tees #customtees #vinyltees #sportswear #apparel #fashion #design

These tags will likely get you some ‘Likes’ and possibly some followers BUT do you think this audience will buy many T-shirts from you? Considering that Instagram now limits the number of hashtags (30 at the time of this writing) you should research before you hashtag your posts.

For example, if you are selling a T-shirt with a skull on the back up of how many people that are searching for the hashtags mentioned above do you think will buy one of your shirts – if any? If you were to tag your post with the following then your post would likely perform 5x or more than with the above hashtags:

#Sturgis #Sturgis2015 #motorcycleclub #rebel #tough #skull

Think about what your buyers are searching for on Instagram and not who is posting similar content. In fact, you likely want to star as far away as possible as people selling the same content because they will be the first to steal your ideas!