Is Facebook Useful For Advertising?
There is no doubt that marketing giants like Facebook reach billions of views in a short time. It would seem that there is a good perspective on advertising. But is Facebook really useful for advertising? As you will see in this article, probably not.
First, we would like to mention that you will come across with massive advertising restrictions through Facebook policies. That simply means if you advertise products legally but you do not match one minor policy which is expressly biased by Facebook, it will restrict your Facebook business account for no reason at all. Facebook will never explain to you why your business account is restricted except that it breaches some general advertising polices.
But it gets even weirder. One business customer of Facebook was asked to provide for identification documents to use advertising account. This requirement is not even provided in the Facebook’s advertising policies. The business owner did not provide his personal identification documents for Facebook because this request was illegal and excessive. Sometime later, Facebook banned this business user for life, stating unrelated concerns about Facebook security policies.
Imagine you officially register a company, you get a company code, VAT code, official address, bank account, domain, you even open Facebook business account and after some time later Facebook informs you are a security threat to Facebook and prohibits you from advertising for life. The strangest thing we manage to assess is that when some fake profiles or profiles promoting illegal stuff or obscene content are created and spread on Facebook and when someone reports it, Facebook simply states that everything is according to the community guidelines and standards. But when you post your content legally on Facebook, this can be held as a breach of Facebook policies. From this point, it is obvious how low and absurd those Facebook guidelines and policies are.
No business owner can be sure that Facebook will not restrict the business account for no reason at all. In comparison with LinkedIn, Pinterest social networks, no such requirements as to provide personal identification documents for selling or advertising something were ever requested. The business accounts were not restricted for dubious reasons. All in all, Facebook raises some serious questions about privacy concerns.
Second, we tested the effectiveness of Facebook advertising. Here, you will not be extremely disappointed that your business account is restricted to life. Most of Facebook advertising goes uselessly. When you create Facebook ad, one thing for sure is that you get a lot of views. But those views basically do not convert to customers. It seems users scroll down your content, and that’s it. Even if some users convert, it is still a loss in general comparing how much you spend for every ad campaign. Of course, Facebook is not interested in that.
We understand that Facebook ads can be profitable if you run and manage some types of campaigns. But with excessive business restrictions, polices when it is unnecessary at all, Facebook raises tremendous concerns about business in future on this social platform.
Conclusion
Facebook justified its goals to be social meeting service, which developed into social information service. But at the same time Facebook never took root to business practices or services. According to that, we can conclude that Facebook is useful for organic content only.