Facebook’s head of measurement and insight Brad Smallwood has good news: based on Facebook’s internal research, a campaign starts to deliver results in approximately one year. You heard it right…according to Facebook, brands should be prepared to wait 365 days before a campaign produces something of value. Maybe the people at facebook are that naive but if anyone and I mean anyone tells a client that they have to wait a year for their advertising to produce an ROI they would promptly be shown the exit.
I’m not going to go on an anti facebook rant here. I do believe that every brand should be on facebook what I am questioning is the value of a brands facebook page in leading to conversion. Research has consistently shown that for most brands in grocery chains POP displays are a lot more effective than social media but it comes down to an understanding of how consumers make purchase decisions. Are consumers really going to research all the products they buy ? Of course not.
The other problem with facebook is that a lot of people have been sucked into the vanity metric of the number of fans who follow them. Despite a lot of material and research written around the value of a facebook fan nobody can say for sure what they are worth in hard business metrics. Some brands do really well with their fans (i.e. Starbucks, Subaru) while others collect fans and then like to tell the world how their social media strategy is working (i.e Coke).
The bottom line is that for someone, anyone, to say that it takes a year to produce an ROI for an ad is either stupid or has very little actual world branding and marketing experience. P L E A S E !
I love the challenge of marketing today because consumers have a wealth of information at their disposal 24/7/365 via the Internet. Over the last 17 years I have worked on some great brands including Sony's Discman, Canon Video products and consumer pharma brands like Cialis. I have learned a lot and continue to apply what I have learned via new learning.
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