202: Two (Misguided) Questions Auctioneers Ask About Facebook Advertising

At the end of July, a Wall Street selloff knocked $119,400,000 off Facebook’s market capitalization. Over two days, the Silicon Valley giant lost almost 20% of its estimated value (though only back to its stock price as of April). Hunted by European litigators and questioned by the United States senate, the company has spent the summer rebuilding its brand.

With the largest social media platform in the news almost every day this summer, I’ve seen auctioneers asking two questions:
• What are you doing to ensure you don’t have all your eggs in the Facebook basket?
• Where will you advertise if/when Facebook goes away?

As someone who spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on Facebook advertising and makes a third of my income from Facebook marketing services, you’d think I’d be asking these questions, too. I’m not. Here’s why.

Facebook isn’t going away any time soon.

Even with the big drop, Facebook is still one of the wealthiest, most profitable companies on the planet. This isn’t a MySpace situation. For one thing, even a fraction of Facebook’s market share would make it the most robust platform on which to pursue clients. LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Reddit, and Twitter combined have only as many users as Instagram, Facebook’s secondary platform. 1 Almost one out of every three people on Earth have a Facebook account. That’s amazing by itself but even moreso when you consider that only 54% of the world’s population uses the Internet. 2 In the United States, more adults check Facebook each day than read all American newspapers—combined—during the course of a week.

The next thing will be easy to spot.

There’s a case to be made that social media as a media category might decline someday when people grow tired of the comparison game it represents. Facebook, being the biggest player, would probably take the biggest hit. Nothing happens in a vacuum, though. If you remove social media from daily practice, something new will grow to fill that space. What won’t occupy that space is traditional media. It definitely won’t be newspaper, as the American attention span continues to shrink. Nobody confidently knows what’s next or when it will get here, but it will require at least as much adaptation and intuition to operate there as Facebook demands now. Whatever moves into that space will approach with lots of buzz and probably fanfare much like Facebook did more than a decade ago.

Facebook isn’t monolithic.

Facebook isn’t just Facebook. It’s not just Instagram and WhatsApp and Messenger, either. Facebook’s Audience Network spans scores of the prominent news and entertainment sites on the Internet. Like Google’s display ad network, Facebook ads appear all over the web to visitors with Facebook accounts. So, even if someone deletes the Facebook and Instagram apps from their phone or just never uses them, they can still be targeted by Facebook’s ads. In fact, on a per-ad basis, Facebook daily analyzes from which of its platforms people are most efficiently coming to your website and adjusts your daily spend proportionally. If you’re eggs are all in one Facebook basket, it’s a lot bigger basket than you might realize.

Facebook isn’t the only go-to pitch now, anyway.

There are some rare auctions where I advise a campaign to have at least 90% of the budget allocated to Facebook, but those represent the exception and not the rule. What you’re selling, where you’re selling it, and how you’re selling it influence the media mix. This is also true of the resources available to you like (1) email subscribers and (2) past bidder registrations for the same asset category being advertised. Sometimes, a public relations campaign does your heavy lifting on a truly unique auction. Sometimes, a purchased mailing list is the most targeted tool available. There are even a handful of newsprint outlets I still recommend. Often, media choices aren’t based on efficiency or efficacy but on assumptions and perceptions the seller has to feel like you covered all of your bases. If you are avidly tracking all media individually in Google Analytics for every auction, you’ll know what media you use for buyers & sellers and which ones you use for branding or showmanship. You’ll also be able to see trends as they happen.

When I look at the Facebook accounts of the auctioneers asking these questions, I typically find people who aren’t well-versed in Facebook advertising. I wonder if they are hoping for the seemingly-complicated reality of Facebook’s paid advertising to go away so they can get back to the set-it-and-forget-it nature of traditional media. If they got the efficient results my clients do on Facebook, I’m not sure they’d wish for this strike-out pitch to disappear. Even if their wish came true, though, it would be a long, slow decline.

The more important questions to ask are:
• How am I adapting to the changing buying culture?
• What have my experimentation and analytics shown me recently?

Marketers who don’t continually ask themselves those questions will eventually be replaced by those in companies who do. That should worry every auctioneer far more than the future of Facebook.

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1 “Top 15 Most Popular Social Media Sites and Apps [August 2018]” by Priit Kallas, Dreamgrow.com, August 2018.

2 “Internet Users in the World by Regions” by Internet World Stats.com, December 21, 2017.

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Stock image purchased from iStockPhoto.com. All other images linked to their respective sources.

125: 3 Words That Will Change Your Marketing Strategy

Back in April, MINI USA brought me to the 2014 New York International Auto Show to answer media questions about what it was like filming a Final Test Test Drive video. The night prior to the first media day, another winner and I were treated to dinner by Peppercomm, the public relations firm coordinating our interviews.

After we finished eating, the Peppercomm consultants walked us through helpful advice on how to interact with the reporters that we would meet the next day. Fifteen years removed from public relations classes in college, I was thankful for their insight; and I’ll be keeping their instructional packet for future reference.

What struck me most from the entire session, though, was the tag line under the Peppercomm logo.

“Listen. Engage. Repeat.”

That’s great advice for both public relations and interpersonal relationships like marriage, parenting, and mentorships. Because of its inherent truth, it’s also probably the best advice I’ve ever heard for social media and company promotion, too.

For almost half a decade, I’ve been telling auctioneers to stop treating social media like a broadcast channel—another line item in an advertising budget. For many entrepreneurs and marketers, Facebook, Twitter, email, and blogs are just additional fields into which they’ll copy and paste their advertising headlines. In reality, though, social media are just online environments for the kind of conversations we have offline. The attributes of successful conversations are the same for successful social media.

Listen first. Interact with your conversation partners (even if just a small slice of your audience). Engage—just like you would in an offline social event. Ask questions that let them know you’re paying attention. If possible, affirm what’s interesting or good within their content. Then, just as in-person conversations, add content where it builds upon the foundation of what they’ve expressed. Only then, talk about the services or assets your business brings to market.

If you’ve given away knowledge (or inspiration or entertainment) for free, your audience will probably have already investigated what is that you do and sell. If they haven’t, starting with conversations and interesting posts will at least make your next sales pitch more of a soft sell.

The same principle holds true for your company promotion. Before you start a new marketing campaign, first interview your past clients. Listen to their answers to questions like, “How did you hear about us?” and “Why did you do business with us?” Those answers will tell you the solutions you provide and the media (or environments) where similar prospects likely congregate. Build your initiative around those answers, and then interact with your next round of clients. If the answers are the same, keep up the good work. If the answers are different, evaluate why; and adjust your next campaign accordingly.

Listen. Engage. Repeat. Most of us are really good at the repeat part. We like doing the same thing over and over again, because it’s easier. It’s the first two that entrepreneurs and marketers—me included—struggle to implement. And those are the most important two legs of the tripod.

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Taking It Personally

Church attendance as a percentage has been declining across the United States. Pundits attribute this to multiple factors, but I would posit that Peppercomm’s three-stage advice could explain a lot of that drop. So much of American evangelism misses the listen and engage parts of successful communication. Organized religion is good at protecting tradition, repeating the clichés, and putting the same verses on protest placards. We can broadcast a lot better than we listen or engage.

If we ever want to attract unchurched people to our lifestyle, we have to close our mouths and open our minds. We need to spend more time conversing and less time blogging. We need to remove the bumper stickers and add friends from different social groups. It’s not that we are trying to hide the truth we believe or even rebrand it. God doesn’t need us to sell anything for him. We can, though, make it more approachable and personal by having authentic conversations with people who don’t do church.