Ways your business is wasting time on Facebook

Ways your business is wasting time on Facebook

1. Creating overly promotional content

Content creation is time-consuming, and you don’t want those hours of hard work to go to waste. If you’ve been wondering about the reason for that drastic dip in your business’s organic reach, you probably haven’t heard our calls to halt the creation of overly promotional content. Facebook has been encouraging content creators on the network to replace the straight-up promo material with stories that add value or provide more history for your business’s products and services. These kinds of posts have a higher likelihood of being seen by bigger audiences.

2. Posting Instagram pictures without context

Here’s a thought process that might sound familiar: Instagram runs on beautiful images. Images increase engagement on Facebook. Instagram is part of Facebook. So I should repost all my Instagram photos automatically on my Facebook Page, right?

Wrong. Even if it may seem like a time-saving technique to automatically post the same update to multiple networks, it might cost you reach on both networks. For starters, your brand’s Instagram profile and Facebook Page may be serving different purposes, so content from one may not fit the overall tone of messaging on the other. Your audiences on the networks may also be drastically different, so what resonates with your Instagram followers may not quite jive with your Facebook fans. If you want to reuse a photo, make sure to provide enough context for it to make a meaningful, valuable Facebook post.

3. Getting in comment wars

Even if you have a sufficient number of customer support channels, it’s not unusual for people to reach out to you on Facebook. Don’t discourage this method of communication, and don’t engage in any sort of negative exchange. If a disgruntled customer comments on your Facebook post, reply quickly and reach out to them via Messenger.

Stay away from any negative Facebook comment threads from competitor brands. It’s important to be aware of these conversations, but participating in them isn’t necessary—especially if none of the negative claims are substantiated. You risk doing more damage to your online reputation if you do get involved in a comment war with your competition, especially if this is done at the expense of your engagement with followers and fans.

4. Browsing Trending articles

Facebook’s Trending sidebar shows the top three most discussed topics in your network. You can click on the headlines to discover more detailed information—but before you do, ask yourself if this topic is relevant to your work. The Trending sidebar provides a brief summary of the important details of the story, so unless the trending news is highly relevant to your industry or your audience’s interests, you shouldn’t browse the articles associated with it. Curiosity is not a bad trait; however, if you’re spending your time on Facebook reading about Tyra Banks’ selfie, you’re wasting precious time that could instead be spent talking to your followers.

5. Always creating custom ads instead of boosting posts

Facebook allows Page owners to put small amounts of cash on an existing post in order to boost its reach. This option can be a lot faster—and a lot cheaper!—than creating original advertisement content. While this shouldn’t be the only sponsored option you explore on Facebook, boosting posts is a fast and cost-effective way to test engagement from a new target demographic or a new type of media promotion. Depending on the results these boosted posts yield, you can then decide whether it’s worth investing a bigger budget into an ad.

6. Skipping A/B tests for your Facebook ads

Another opportunity Facebook gives to businesses is running split tests on their ads to see which group performs better. This basically means sending out two slightly different versions of your ad to different target audiences, and see which one receives more engagements. Your Facebook Page admin may think they are saving time by skipping the testing stage, but in reality, this can be a huge missed opportunity.

Facebook is a standalone advertising platform, and promoted content that works well for other networks may not get you the same numbers here. There are many elements you can test with your Facebook ad, such as placement, format, and copy length. Try out different variations with each ad you create, and note the winner of that category. Not only will this save you some time, it’ll also likely increase the return on investment  on your Facebook ads.

7. Taking too long to create a Facebook update

There is a lot of pressure to post updates that get likes, comments, and shares—and there are always days when your Facebook muse is absent. However, you don’t have hours to spend on composing a single update. If the inspiration just won’t come, do some productive social media browsing to find ideas. Another solution is asking your colleagues for advice: run your existing posts by knowledgeable coworkers to see what improvements can be made.

You can also take a look at posts that have performed well in the past, and repurpose this content for a new post. Try looking for content that can be updated with some new information, or a new angle. If after all these steps you’re still not satisfied with the Facebook post, maybe it’s a good day for some curated content.

8. Reposting videos from external sources

Since Facebook natively enabled video content of that type has yielded amazing engagement results. So if you’re still embedding YouTube videos on your Page, you’re doing it wrong. Auto-playing Facebook videos encourage your followers to spend more time engaging with the content, which registers with the network’s algorithm. Plus, posting Facebook videos and judging their performance can help you choose content for future video ads.

9. Not completing your About section

This is another time sinkhole, with the solution in the category of “invest more time first, spend less time later.” If you don’t include all the necessary information about your company on your Facebook Page, you risk creating confusion among those who turn to that social account for details about your business.

If you want to avoid spending time answering the same questions, provide a detailed description on the About section of your Page. This includes a brief description of your brand mission, a list of products or services you provide, a link to your official website, and a physical address, if your company has one.

10. Liking irresponsibly

Finally, just like any other Facebook user, Facebook Page managers can like other people’s posts and Pages. In a similar fashion, businesses you’ve liked on Facebook show up in a Liked sidebar on your Page, so you must execute caution when pressing the ‘Like’ button. Your online properties are valuable real estate, so you don’t want visitors of your Page to see brands you wouldn’t necessarily endorse as a business. Select a few partners or clients to like, and let your Liked sidebar highlight your partnership. Plus, liking a Page authorizes new updates to appear on your News Feed, and you don’t want to create opportunities for distraction by liking Pages with low content quality.

Another way you might be wasting time on Facebook? Page management. Hootsuite makes it easy to schedule posts, share video, and monitor conversations so you can spend time on what matters—connecting with your customers. 

Does Internet advertising actually work?

Does Internet Advertising Work at All?


The Internet was supposed to tell us which ads work and which ads don't. But instead it's flooded consumers' brains with reviews, comments, and other digital data that has diluted the power of advertising altogether.


Nineteenth-century retailer John Wanamaker is responsible for perhaps the most repeated line in marketing: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don't know which half."


Today, marketers are grappling with the Wanamaker Paradox: The more we learn which half of advertising is working, the more we realize we're wasting way more than half.

Perhaps you're nodding your head about now. Most people you know don't click online ads. At least, not on purpose. But now research is getting closer to quantifying exactly how few people click on Internet ads and exactly how ineffective they are. It's not a pretty picture.

The Problem With Search
Take search ads, which have helped Google become the richest advertising company in the history of the world. Search ads are magic, in a way. Throughout history, most ads have been imprecise branding. You're watching TV or reading the newspaper, and you're interrupted by marketing—Samsung's new thing is shiny; Ford F-something-something can drive through dirt; Blah blah blah GEICO—that has the staying power of a snowflake in an oven. But search catches consumers at the moment they're actually looking for something. It shrinks the famous "purchase funnel" to its final stage and gives us tailored answers when we're asking a specific question.

That's the theory, at least. But a new controlled study on search ads from eBay research labs suggests that companies like Google vastly exaggerate the effectiveness of search.

For example, consider what happens when I look up a brand, like Nike. An ad for Nike.com appears just above an organic link to ... Nike.com.

Campaigns like this have "no measurable short-term benefits," the researchers concluded. They merely give consumers a perfect substitute for the link they would have clicked anyway. (The only way it would add value is if Nike is paying to keep a rival like Adidas out of the top slot ... assuming Google would sell Adidas the top sponsored link on searches for "Nike").

But what about more common searches for things like "buy camera" or "best cell phone," where many different companies are bidding to answer our queries? A well-placed search ad ought to grab curious consumers at the peak of their interest.

But in a study of search ads bought by eBay, the most frequent Internet users—who see the vast majority of ads; and spend the most money online—weren't any more likely to buy stuff from eBay after seeing search ads. The study concluded that paid-search spending was ironically concentrated on the very people who were going to buy stuff on eBay, anyway. "More frequent users whose purchasing behavior is not influenced by ads account for most of the advertising expenses, resulting in average returns that are negative," the researchersconcluded.
'I Was Gonna Buy It, Anyway'

I'm not fully convinced that search ads are as ineffective as this paper suggested. To their credit, the authors admit that other studies about Google have found search to have higher ROI.

But the big idea behind their research is powerful. Academics call it endogeneity. We can call it the I-was-gonna-buy-it-anyway problem. Some ads persuade us to buy. Some ads tell us to buy something we were already going to buy, anyway. It's awfully hard to figure out which is which.Enter Facebook, the second-biggest digital ad company in the U.S. Just as Google is synonymous with search, Facebook is ubiquitous with social. The News Feed is the most sophisticated content algorithm ever. The company represents the spine of so many apps and sites that it can marshal an astonishing (and growing) amount of data about us.
While Google can convert consumers at the bottom of the purchase funnel, Facebook is more like TV, a diffuse broadcast of stories where some companies hope to interrupt our lazy attention with branding messages. In 2012, Facebook partnered with Datalogix, a firm that measures the shopping habits of 100 million U.S. families, to see if people who went on Facebook and saw ads for, say, Hot Pockets, were more likely to go out and buy Hot Pockets. According to Facebook's internal studies, the ads weren't getting many clicks, but they were working brilliantly. “Of the first 60 campaigns we looked at, 70 percent had a 3X or better return-on-investment—that means that 70 percent of advertisers got back three times as many dollars in purchases as they spent on ads,” Sean Bruich, Facebook’s head of measurement platforms and standards, told Farhad Manjoo.
There are a few reasons to be skeptical when Facebook concludes that its ads are working spectacularly. First is the basic B.S.-detector blaring inside your soul saying you shouldn't automatically believe companies who say "our research has apparently concluded unambiguously that we are awesome." Facebook, ad agencies, and ad consultants all benefit from more ad spending. These are not objective parties.

Second, there's that pesky I-was-gonna-buy-it-anyway bias. Let's say I want to buy a pair of glasses. I live in New York, where people like Warby Parker. I've shopped for glasses at Warby Parker's website. Facebook knows both of these things. So no surprise that today I saw a Warby Parker sponsored post on my News Feed.

Now, let's say I buy glasses from Warby Parker tomorrow. What can we logically conclude? That Facebook successfully converted a sale? Or that the many factors Facebook considered before showing me that ad—e.g.: what my friends like and my past shopping behavior—are the same factors that might persuade anybody to buy a pair of glasses long before they signed into Facebook?

Maybe Facebook has mastered the art of using advertising to convert sales. Or maybe it's mastered the art of finding people who were going to buy certain items anyway and showing them ads after they already made their decision. My bet is that the answer is (a) somewhere in the middle and (b) devilishly hard to accurately measure.

Too Much Information
The eBay study suggested that people who click most ads aren't being influenced.

The Facebook study suggested that people who are being influenced aren't actually clicking ads.
It makes you wonder whether clicks matter, at all.

In fact, there's reason to wonder whether all advertising—online and off—is losing its persuasive punch. Itamar Simonson and Emanuel Rosen, the authors of the new book Absolute Value, have an elegant theory about the weakened state of brands in the information age. Corporations used to have much more control over what kind of information consumers could find about their company. The signal of advertising was stronger when it wasn’t diluted by the sound pollution of the Internet and social media.

Think about how much you can learn about products today before seeing an ad. Comments, user reviews, friends' opinions, price-comparison tools: These things aren’t advertising (although they're just as ubiquitous). In fact, they’re much more powerful than advertising because we consider them information rather than marketing. The difference is enormous: We seek information, so we're more likely to trust it; marketing seeks us, so we're more likely to distrust it.

Simonson and Rosen share an anecdote from 2007: Ten thousand people around the globe were asked if they'd want a portable digital device like the iPhone. Market research concluded that there wasn't sufficient demand in the U.S., Europe, or Japan for an such a device, because people liked their cameras, phones, and MP3 players too much to want them mushed into one device. Today the iPhone is the most famous phone in the world, not just because its ad campaign was so great, but because the user reviews of the phone were overwhelmingly positive and so widely disseminated.

Measuring and predicting individual purchases has never been easy. But measuring and predicting how everybody's purchase is affecting everybody else's shopping behavior in the Panopticon of the Internet is practically impossible.
The Internet was supposed to tell us which ads work and which ads don't. Instead, it's flooded consumers' brains with reviews, comments, and other information that has diluted the power of advertising. The more we learn about how consumers make decisions, the more we learn we don't know.