I put my family business on Facebook. Here’s what happened.

One of the most important thing I learned when doing advertising is to not be a pioneer (as the saying goes "they get shot in the back".) Particularly in small business advertising.

If you see your competitors (or people will similar products or services) using a particular medium it's usually a good bet to at least try. But even if you try you have to give it a test of quite a bit of time (and that depends on the product and amount of profit as well and other factors).

A good example of this is "back in the day" yellow page advertising. If you look at what the YP called "a developed" heading (like Plumbers/Printers/Lawyers) you will see many ads year after year that vary in size including many full page ads. So that is a sign that's a good bet for advertising if that's your business. Especially when you find out the high cost. And I built an entire business based upon starting with a small ad in a developed heading in the yellow pages. Ad went in. Calls came in. (Expensive but worth it. Picked up a major account and did it for maybe 10 years until I sold the company). To me it made sense that if year after year small businesses were spending big dollars to be in the YP that was proof that it worked (and to mention again it did work extremely well for me). Of course when your competitors who don't advertise ask you you downplay totally the value and bitch and moan to throw them off the scent.

I would suspect FB works the same way. (In fact that was my experience using fb for a particular product but I can't say I gave it much of a chance though but take that as another data point).

I also had a similar experience with "card decks" those mailers that go out to businesses offering products and services. Worked very well. Sent out a card in multiple decks for a product that others offered and leads came back just like that.

"...a pretty boring business-to-business industrial sector"

The outcome was predictable from reading the first sentence. This is not a story about any failure of Facebook, it's a story about not understanding how to market to an appropriate demographic.

What I find interesting about Facebook pages is the brutal honesty that consumers can sometimes share (as the brand watches frantically and tries to do damage control on comments). It's like the opposite of smart advertising: giving every prospective customer an easy place to go see what people really think. For example some new diet beverages set up pages, and after reading enough comments about how horrible the drinks tasted I never needed to buy even one to try myself.

I've seen a lot of these articles about the effectiveness of facebook ads in the months leading up to - and now in the days following - the ipo. The recent ones sometimes come across as articles by people who are short the stock, trying to encourage a sell-off. Most of the time, they come across as people simply justifying to themselves why they will not or do not own shares in the company. And it's perfectly fine to write about why you won't buy facebook stock.

It's just interesting the amount of noise that goes along with the public markets. You have to take articles/news with an even bigger grain of salt when a public company is involved in the noise. You just don't know peoples' motives. I'm not saying that I think this guy is short FB, I'm just saying its possible, and that I didn't see as many of these articles one or two years ago, even though millions of SMEs were trying their hand at facebook ads back then.

By liking them, you're advertising them. Your "like" factors into your friends getting an update saying "jlarocco likes the Super Sandwich Stall", and thinking "huh, I should go and try that place".

It's somewhat meaningless now, admittedly: I might not speak for everyone, but I've basically tuned out anyone "liking" anything on Facebook as white noise.