The GM/Facebook story proves that content is still king

It seems like Facebook’s IPO has been in the news more than the presidential election.  People are excited and therefore you get both sides of the aisle chiming in, the bears and the bulls.  The one story that is getting a lot of attention lately is GM’s “pulling” of their Facebook ads.  The story says that GM was not seeing the click through rate they were looking for so they dropped their spend.  That’s fine, if it doesn’t work for you then you are right to pull your ads.  The problem is that this has creating a Chicken Little scenario for Facebook advertisers and I don’t think it warranted.

The real problem with advertising on Facebook is that brands assume the ads are a magic bullet.  Facebook is the ‘big man on campus’ in social so brands think that if they put an ad in the right column of the page it will guarantee clicks or impressions or sales.  Let’s be clear, this is a social network and your ads need to be engaging to deserve clicks.  The point of Facebook and Twitter etc. is to connect with the consumer, engage with them, give them something interesting, new, and unique, not just stick a banner ad in their newsfeed.  I call this practice social bill-boarding and its bad marketing.  Take a look at Ford’s reaction:

The fact is I don’t know what GM’s Facebook ads looked like, I didn’t see them. I have no idea if they were engaging or how they defined success.  What I do know is that brands have been complaining that click through rates only average at .05%, which is much lower than Google etc.  What that tells me is that their ads are not being optimized well.  I’ve seen brands pulling closer to .3% click through rate so why is there such a disconnect?  It’s the content, content is king.  You need to use good copy, have a clear and actionable call to action, use good images and above all be engaging.

We’re all waiting to see what happens when the IPO does finally arrive.  Then we’ll see if all of this talk and complaining about the Facebook ad platform has any effect on the stock price.  Either way it’s likely most brands will continue to advertise with Facebook, but maybe, just maybe if enough brands drop their Facebook ads it will make things cheaper for the brands I work with.  And I’m OK with that.