Facebook’s pages platform reaches only six percent of a brand’s followers; and it’s headed down to one to two percent.
If businesses want to make sure that people see their content, the best strategy is, and always has been, paid advertising.
One of the problems with advertising experts is that they have a free pass.
They go around to conferences, they talk to the press, they write stupid blogs, and they make profound and confident statements about the advertising industry.
And no one ever goes back and checks up on them.
Lying is different from bullshit.
When you lie, you know what the truth is but you intentionally misrepresent it. In a way bullshit is more insidious because people who bullshit often don’t know what the truth is and don’t care.
They’re out to make a point; they’re out to sell you an idea; and they really don’t care whether what they are saying is true or not.
The theory that people want to engage with brands online and share their enthusiasms with their friends and that their friends will share their enthusiasms with other friends through social media channels has turned out to be an infantile fantasy.
In fact, what social media sites are rapidly becoming is just one more channel for traditional paid advertising.
Here’s what you need to know about social media:
The hundreds of millions of people using social media are interested in interacting with each other.
Not brands, not ads, not you, not me.
Email remains a more effective way to acquire customers than social media.
Nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined.
Most brands are realizing that their social media programs are way more time consuming, way more expensive, and way less capable of driving sales than was promised.
There are people (in advertising) that believe that consumers are ‘in love’ with brands.
They believe consumers want to have ‘relationships’ with brands.
They want to have ‘personal experiences’ and be ‘personally engaged’ with brands.
There are people (in advertising) that believe that consumers are going on Facebook and Twitter and having conversations with each other about brands.
Bullshit has become such a powerful weapon that it’s hard for us to stop ourselves from using it.
We use it on consumers.
We use it on our clients.
And we are now bullshitting ourselves.
An alarming amount of online interaction is apparently fraudulent.
Only 38% of traffic on the web now is human.
62% is bots, scrapers, hackers, spammers, and other impersonators.
And the amount of fraud being perpetrated on advertisers by online scammers is 54% of display ads paid for by advertisers between May 2012 and February 2013 never appeared in front of a live human being.