Why Facebook has become the impossible break-up
Facebook may not be attracting younger users in the same way it hooked in their parents, but Dan Monheit argues those people who are on it are now so reliant it's hard to leave.
Yesterday, Facebook showed me six memories ‘from this day’. It also reminded me about three birthdays and two upcoming events.
All helpful. All not so subtle reminders of why I can never leave.
Sure, we hear rumblings about Facebook’s numbers dwindling and new platforms coming and going, but none of it really matters. Not when I, like the 15 million other monthly active users (11 million daily), am consistently, passively (aggressively) reminded, that breaking up with Facebook is near on impossible.
We know that Facebook has long filled a void in our lives formerly known as ‘boredom’. We also know it’s become the highly addictive, personalised, 24/7 news source for millions of us.
But what’s less obvious, is how many important, almost invisible things, we’ve actually outsourced to the platform.
Our paper diary, filled with handwritten notes for birthdays, anniversaries and milestones. Our personal Rolodex, with addresses and contact details for those near and far. Our calendar, peppered with upcoming parties, concerts and shows.
Our memory box, stuffed with trinkets and mementos to help us remember who we were with, what we did, and how we felt all those weeks, months and years ago.
Most of us have already outsourced so much to Facebook, that the cost of breaking up is debilitatingly high.
How would we keep in touch with people? How would we know what was going on? Could we seriously remember all of those birthdays? Would somebody call to personally invite us to their party? What about an event? And what would happen to all those funny photos, quotes, connections and conversations that defined the past 10 years?
That’s right, the perceived cost of leaving is already sky high, and it grows with every day that we stay.
As marketers, the implication is as obvious as it is imperative: Lean in harder.
A quick perspective check: At the dizzy heights of 90’s TV, a weekly show like Friends could pull almost 3 million viewers (none of whom even had mobile phones to play with during the ads).
Today, Facebook gives us unbridled access to almost four times that audience, every day of the year – in a way that’s segmentable, actionable, measurable – and going nowhere anytime soon.
Yes, continue tipping your budgets into digital and social, but more importantly, invest your time and attention into understanding – and I mean really understanding – how it all works. After all, your audience is here, and despite what some misguided, sensationalist ‘expert/professors’ say, they will be for the foreseeable future.
Rather than glossing over the details, educate yourself about the different formats your ads and content can take, as well as the ways they can interact with one another to drive revenue.
Learn about using retargeting pools and Custom Audiences to achieve reach and frequency that’s blindingly efficient. Study up on why videos shot in a 1:1 aspect ratio, with the punchline at the start and an irrelevant audio track will perform the pants off a standard piece of video content uploaded to the platform.
The impossible break-up means these details are more than just ‘minutiae’ that you can leave to the whiz kids at the agency.
They’re the new plays in the new playbook, and like it or not, the playbook is here to stay. They’re quick to learn, easy to understand, and you’ve still got years over which you can amortise your (very small) initial learning investment.
As you’d expect, the Ads Guide section of the Facebook website is a good starting starting point, and any agency on your roster worth their salt should be able to get you up to speed in a couple of hours.
Ignore the playbook at your peril. Embrace it for your best chance at getting the most out of your agencies, and the once in a generation opportunity that ‘the impossible breakup’ presents.
Dan Monheit is director of strategy and owner at Hardhat Digital
… our personal details
… copyright to all the photos we posted
… the right to use our name
… the list goes on
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This is a typical op-ed mess by a media channel specialist (social media in this case) advocating their channel of specialism without any useful data or insight into changing behaviour or marketing outcomes.
Tomorrow.. Sponsorship Activation Strategist outlines that sponsorship activation is really important, under appreciated and not understood by anyone. Especially professors or agnostic marketing types.
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Is Facebook a critical part of the average users life today?
Maybe, for a very tiny proportion of the user base. I would suggest that for the vast bulk of the audience, it is a more “casual” usage scenario, where advertising content is viewed as a necessary evil getting between them and pictures of their family and friends.
Is it a useful way of sharing/distributing content and generating comments? Absolutely, but most businesses will probably have to pay for the privilege as organic reach is now very, very poor.
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Hi Sam G,
Not sure how you missed it but the data I provided is that in Australia, Facebook has 11 million daily active users. If you’re in the business of selling something, there’s a pretty good chance some of your customers are in that 11 million.
There’s plenty of data floating around about time spent on the platform, views per day etc but if the 11 million highly segmentable, affordably reachable sets of eyeballs doesn’t get you, I don’t think the other stuff will make much difference.
With regard to changing marketing outcomes, my suggestion (contained within the very same article) is that marketers invest their time (not just their budgets) in truly understanding how the platform works to get the most out of it (read: use it to sell more stuff).
I hope that helps. Looking forward to learning more about sponsorship activation tomorrow.
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Facebook is just the new yellow pages. Once you get that you realise what an appalling advertising medium it is. Click-throughs on an ad 1 in 1000. The worst conversion rate period.
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As an ‘agnostic’ ad exec I have to disagree. I remain a believer in the awesome branding power of TV, the relevance of OOH, radio, and physical DM etc. But our agency also does a lot of digital, across lots of formats. And what I’m consistently seeing is Facebook out-performing regular programmatic, display, mobile on CTR, CPC and ROI. For our audiences anyway.
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Remarkably, Facebook reaches 15 million Australians a month. Even more remarkably, TV reaches 16 million Australians A DAY.
Facebook has many great qualities, not least its beautiful synergies with TV for advertisers. But when it comes to reach, scale, ROI, brand safety, measurability and reliability, TV remains unbeatable.
Great to see that Facebook spent heavily on TV advertising for its Facebook Live campaign too.
http://www.adweek.com/news/adv.....ore-174176
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Well done Dan for a common sense piece challenging and encouraging marketers. Indeed, you’re quite right about the power of Facebook as a channel and many marketers ought to move beyond ticking the box by running basic campaigns and instead investing time to learn the platform which will pay off in the long run. Or, alternately, have someone (agency or publisher partner) who knows Facebook do it on their behalf.
Retargeting with dynamic content based on the audiences visiting specific pages of a clients site is one example that’s a little time consuming but relatively inexpensive at driving strong results.
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I think the beauty of Facebook centers around how easy to use it is, both as a regular user and as an advertiser. I tried google ads in the past, but Facebook is undoubtedly much easier to use. Also, as a regular user, it’s rather addictive and so easy to use you don’t even realize you are already in there. Somehow, it has become part of our daily lives, and even if younger generations are not signing up as before, I think Facebook is so big, they are not too worried about it.
Great articel guys, keep up the good work!
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Where are you getting these monthly and daily active users numbers? They are hilariously low. You really think only 15 million of the 200 million Facebook users in the United States are active on a daily basis? Try 150 million, buddy.
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