I have to ask because I am genuinely interested and no one has yet given me a straight answer…
As a small business owner, does posting your ads and special offers to a multitude of Facebook groups, pages and walls actually bring results. And if yes, what is the return on your time and effort, plus how do you track which ones work best.
It’s a serious question because I have yet to meet anyone who uses this type of Facebook machine gun marketing that says it works. I am open to being proved wrong!
Machine gun marketing… Fire enough bullets and one of them is bound to hit the target at some point.
More importantly, I have yet to speak to anyone who doesn’t find this practice incredibly annoying.
Is Facebook the right place to post ads?
Are Facebook updates the right place for your ads?
I don’t know about you, but I don’t log in to Facebook to have ads shoved in my newsfeeds. I’m not waiting with baited breath for my newsfeed to fill with updates filled with exclamation marks, stars and messages to inbox anyone.
This post was inspired by an event this morning. I help moderate a small business network group over on Facebook. If you’re in the Widnes area, you are welcome to join.
Despite having
- group guidelines (basically no selling or ads),
- a place to leave your contact details,
- a place to leave your special offers and
- a place to post your events
Some people just fail to use them and spam the wall in the latest round of machine gun marketing.
I don’t want to ban people from the group. This morning it happened. I don’t have the time or patience to keep removing the same ad every week.
So I was sat here thinking…
Facebook Update Ad Effectiveness?
If you spent the same amount of time posting your ads to places people go to see ads, would you get better results?
In theory, you would.
Narrowing your focus to people who are actually looking to buy rather than scattering your message in the hope someone who is interested sees it on Facebook…
I’m not convinced of the effectiveness of free ads though – but no evidence to back that thought up!
In the spirit of experimentation, I have compiled a list of 30 free ad sites. Now all I need are guinea pigs!
Are you a Facebook machine gun marketer? Are you game?
Download the list of free ad sites with clicky links in a PDF – here
- Make a note of your Facebook marketing results.
- On your next round of posting ads use the free ads sites instead
- Compare the difference and let me know!
Of course, I make no guarantees of results – it’s an experiment!
In the meantime, your comments are welcome below. What are your thoughts on mass posting ads on Facebook? Does it work for you?
Facebook Machine Gun Marketing: Step Away From The Update… by Jan Kearney
It's infuriating isn't it? You put all that time and effort into growing your fan base on your Facebook Page and now your updates rarely reach anyone...
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Strangely, I don’t mind my friends who have small businesses posting their wares. I like to know what interests they have and what they are good at. Also, I’d rather give my money to them than a faceless organisation and get something bespoke.
Hi Gareth, I think you may have misunderstood my rant 🙂 I don’t mind small businesses posting their updates and showing off their latest creations or offers – that’s why we follow them, and I agree about prefering to buy from them.
It gets a bit much when they update their Facebook page (and it should be a page btw), then post an ad (usually with lots of **** and !!!!) to every group they’re in, then any other page they can. That’s just spam in my opinion.
If I like their page then I expect to receive updates. I don’t want sales pitches in discussion groups or ads intruding on my page either – I didn’t ask for those and I don’t know anyone who has done it and had business back.
Unless you’re automating the process it is very time consuming. I’d love to know if it works and if it doesn’t why people carry on with it?
Hi Jan,
I think perhaps that the root cause of this is a lack of education about how Facebook works. It’s no secret that people in business are told “get onto Facebook” and so they do but have no idea about etiquette or even how to be effective on Facebook.
I still believe that business comes indirectly from having a presence on FB as does posting in free ads. The hidden benefits in terms of link value, post popularity etc is probably greater than trying to reach an audience directly with an offer. I’ve played with Facebook a lot this year and have experimented with many different approaches on my own pages and those of clients.
I’ve found that providing a bit of humour gets more likes (and can even take your post viral) and that lines up an audience for when you do want to make that sales push. Spamming others pages though for me is a big no, no. Again, that is lack of FB etiquette knowledge I think, I still see some great ideas every day on Facebook to build community and future clients.
Hi Steve, thanks for popping over and your insights. I agree with you, the benefits aren’t the immediately obvious things, although I’m not convinced the effort of pushing engagement to viral is worth it on its own – unless there’s some sort of link or call to action attached.
When I very first joined Facebook for my business I was guilty of trying this approach. I discovered quickly that is didn’t work and was rather annoying for the readers, so stopped! I have replaced it with trying to come up with my own content that could be of use and interest to potential customers.
Hi Kirsty – it’s tempting to try it out when you see so many people doing it! I’ll be honest, the thought crossed my mind – but I know how much it irritates me, so I never did give it a go. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to know if it worked and what were the returns, I’m always up for being proved wrong!
As Steve mentioned in the comment earlier, Facebook isn’t really a good direct sales medium – it’s more subtle. It’s very difficult to measure returns too.- using tracking links (something like bit.ly if you don’t want to set up your own campaigns) helps you see exactly what content is being followed – being the lazy bugger I am, I tend to do this back to sign ups or sales pages only