Forget Facebook’s IPO. The real news this week came when GM declared that Facebook ads are worthless. Okay, so maybe that isn’t a direct quote but they pulled their entire Facebook advertising spend—that’s $10 million—and the world took notice.
Suddenly companies across the globe started wondering if they’ve been duped by the promise of social media. I mean, we all remember when the dot com bubble burst, right? What if this is the beginning of the end?
But there’s more to the story…
GM is still bullish on Facebook as a platform that helps them reach their customers. In fact, they plan on investing $30 million to support their line of automobiles on Facebook over the next year. But Scotty Monty, Ford’s social media czar had a fairly quick retort to GM’s claim about Facebook advertising. The gist? Facebook Ads work for Ford because they have a strategy.
Brian Wallace, Samsung Mobile’s Vice President of strategic marketing was a little more colorful in his response when he told Ad Age that, “Blaming Facebook for a lack of ROI on your advertising is akin to blaming the internet because no one purchased from your website.”
Full disclosure: Terralever was one of the first Facebook Preferred Developers in the world, but our primary responsibility is to the brands we work with. That being said, we think Facebook advertising can be effective if you approach it strategically.
- Know your goals
- Assess the platform to see if it can contribute to your goals
- Test the benefits
- Rinse
- Repeat
Jay Baer’s team over at Convince and Convert may have said it best in a simple Facebook status update yesterday: “What GM does has ZERO impact on YOUR business. Play your own game, people.”
