When Facebook was still young, companies sees it as a way to improve their sales and it did improve the number of their sales. Soon, they got greedy that they were caught up in the number’s game, building up more fans to sell their products into. But, as Facebook grows even more popular, its users were also growing, the users didn’t like it when they are bombarded by post that links to product.
In a recent poll conducted by Gallup Inc., 62% of the 18,000 U.S. consumers participated claimed that they social media can’t influence them to buy products. In 2013, around $5.1 billion were spent on social-media advertising, but consumers aren’t buying because they have seen it on social media sites. The survey was conducted through email from December 2012 to January 2013.
Last year, Nielsen Holdings NV also conducted a survey about social media. This time the survey was whether the consumers would buy a product because they have seen it on television, print, radio, billboards and movie trailers rather than social-media ads. And survey was in favor of print, radio, billboards and movie trailers.
Recently, Facebook has been doing a lot of changes and it affects the news feeds, which companies have used before to market their product to their fans. Facebook has set some limitations on how many people could see your post.
A local company use the power of social media to market their products and they are spending around $5,000 on Facebook ads, and soon the page has grown to 13,000 fans. But, co-owner Jason Minter wasn’t satisfied. Despite the huge number of fans they have, they can only reach 300 to 400 people in a single post. There is a lost in the organic reach. The return that they are expecting aren’t enough compared to the amount of money they spent to grow their fans.
According to a spokesman for Facebook, people are now becoming even more smarter than before. People are reporting the ads that sell them something. And that is why Facebook limited the number of reach for a single post.
Today, it is easier for a post to reach nonfans than the fans themselves since the post are shared on timelines, pushing posts higher in Facebook’s ranking system, as claimed by Socialbakers. Also, there is the fact that fan numbers are easily gamed. Researchers claimed that some fans are fake , created for the sole purpose of inflating the number of fans.
Here is what a facebook spokeperson had to say regarding this story.
The only thing this poll shows is that self-reported behavioral data is unreliable. For decades, studies that look at people’s actual, real-world behavior have shown that ads on all mediums, including social media, affect the things people buy. The most successful marketers in the world don’t just take our word for it when it comes to ad effectiveness, they’ve asked us to prove that our ads work. And we have. Those marketers hold us to a very high standard; we look at actual changes in attitudes and behaviors using experimental design — the same approach used in medical trials.
