81–90 of 412 posts
When I moved to Silicon Valley in 2006, I had just lived through the events that were eventually twisted into the movie The Social Network. My conclusion having witnessed Mark's behavior firsthand was that he was the least trustworthy individual I had ever met and that he was likely to harm others. At the risk of sounding like Chicken Little ("the sky is falling!") I wrote a great deal voicing my point of view, inclu…
Nice video. All true. I have performed tests with the same ad budget ($20k) and target audience for Google and FB. FB ROI was negative. Google ROI was 400% (travel space). The only thing that seemingly "works" has been buying likes by advertising. This video should help educate my clients of the utter uselessness of those too. This brings up the interesting question of the general (non)value of a lot of mobile advert…
Good questions raised about the UX issues that contribute to fraudulent clicks and installs but I take issue with the generalization that only bottom of the funnel, high purchase intent ads are valuable. Startups generally have a bias towards doing things that they can measure accurately. This leads to heavy reliance on highly attributable channels like AdWords since you can target people who have expressed high purc…
As far as biases go, preferring to pay for things that have a demonstrable effect is a pretty good one, especially for startups that generally don't have the resources to waste on a large number of failed initiatives. Sure if you have some incite that gives you a better than normal chance of getting a very high ROI on a creative initiative, then go for it, that's what startups are for. But if you don't have any special incite, stick with what has been shown to be effective, and avoid things like Facebook advertising which appear to give low or negative ROI in the typical case.
I found a way to dramatically improve facebook. Around the beginning of the year I unfollowed every single friend and page, so my newsfeed is completely empty. Now when I want to know what my friends are up to, I go check out their pages, essentially going from a push feed to a pull. It gets me out of the empty crack addiction-esque cycle of going to the news feed and being disappointed/bored with the lives of my fri…
I found a way to dramatically improve facebook. Around the beginning of the year I unfollowed every single friend and page, so my newsfeed is completely empty. Now when I want to know what my friends are up to, I go check out their pages, essentially going from a push feed to a pull. It gets me out of the empty crack addiction-esque cycle of going to the news feed and being disappointed/bored with the lives of my fri…
My solution was to delete my Facebook account. Now, I engage with the people I care about via mechanisms that are far more meaningful: emails, phone calls, a coffee, a lunch.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please write an article about how you run these "profitable" campaigns. Seriously. It seems like you are the only person I've ever heard make this claim and I'm sure people here are dying to know the secret.
I've run many profitable campaigns on Facebook -- by not buying likes or advertising a Facebook Page. You can advertise normal links on Facebook and that operates like any other online ad -- some text and a picture, linked to a landing page for your own site. There's no "likes" to count or "engagement" to measure other than the normal conversion metrics -- how many of the clickthroughs completed whatever action you w…
I for one am confused as to why people chose the other indirect, convoluted way: buying likes, directing people to their FB page, THEN hoping they click through to their actual website.
Well done video and yes this is a problem. But except for the possible hit on how it distributes engagement to the graph, most people will never complain about fake likes, so it will go on. Facebook will adjust to allow for fake likes to not hit engagement and it will go away. However I think they need to add a modifier to regions. Likes count as a like but overall engagement should be less equal from bot farm areas.…
How? Now the problem OP brought up is: if he got too many fake likes, his posts are not being delivered to his organic followers. This cause a major damage for his intention to post, and he is forced to advertise his posts which is ridiculous.
I think there should be some better model to distinguish the organic from the click farms. Here is a proposal: http://bit.ly/LRSdkJ
If you haven't yet watched Derek's earlier video about "the problem with facebook", you should: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g because in it he lays bare several fundamental structural issues about facebook which 99% people don't realize. Well worth the watch. Unless fb changes drastically, it will die a surprisingly fast death.
As someone who has helped massively grow a handful of businesses with Facebook being a significant channel, part of me wants to say "Yep, FB advertising is bunk. Everyone stop!" But in reality I'd be saying that in a weak attempt to make my own Facebook advertising more effective. Lemme tl;dr this in three bullets: - It's far easier for non-sophisticated advertisers to waste money. - The ad platform is pretty technic…
So given that, to see significant ROI you need to find genuine experts in how to use each form of media. So, even if it is technically possible to do well in a given media, if it is really hard to identify who is a genuine expert in that media due to it being new and full of snake-oil merchants, then you are likely to do better in a more established field.
I'm going to get crucified for this, but paid advertising is somewhat analogous to software engineering/developers. There are many languages/platforms/technologies out there. Some old, some cutting edge. Each one most likely has it's own syntax/terminology, patterns, approaches etc.
So when hiring a full stack engineer, you look for someone who cuts pretty deep across a few key areas, but can also roll up their sleeves across the stack if need be. Example: Ruby Expert, Getting into Angular, and knows how to provision AWS if need be.
Same thing with full stack marketer. If you know Google Adwords, Content Marketing and a bit of PR are your core, then optimize your hire for that.
Be sure to watch through to the end for the conclusion! I'll summarise: Click farms like every page they can, far more than just the pages they were paid to like; the theory is that they will evade detection this way. Paying for "legitimate" facebook exposure will expose you to the click farms as well, and that will be the absolute majority of your gained likes. In this way facebook ads give a huge, but useless, gain…
Actually there is a fundamental reason why you're exposed to click farms: because fb exposes your ad to a small sample size of your audience first. Then based on the engagement the ad receives, it will target it more to those 'types' of people. Since click farms are far far more engaged than the average fb user, this means that invariably, your ad will be steered actively by fb towards click farms! So if you pay for…