IS FACEBOOK GOOD OR BAD?
I do not think it is a good thing that a billion people are spending this much time on Facebook. I didn’t think it was a good thing when the same number of people were watching TV for five hours a day, either.
But nobody asked me. And they didn’t ask you. That’s just what people do.
If you’re going to be successful as a marketer or entrepreneur, you must choose to live in the “is” world—not the “should be” world. In the “is” world, 95 percent of people float around in a miasma of mild hypnosis, looking forward to their next hit of “like” and “share” happy juice, or to extract their “pound of flesh” out of some stranger who disagrees with them about politics.
This book is all about how you get inside the minds of Facebook users and get them to do what you want them to do. Whether you’re doing business as a church, a school, a winery, a life coach, a car manufacturer, or a seller of aluminum siding, you’ve got a job to do.
People are going to spend their time and money somewhere. If they spend their time and money with you, you succeed. If they spend it with someone else, you fail. The fact that people are in a state of partial hypnosis provides a platform where you can sell them your product or service. In this book, you’ll learn how to harness that power.
Working vs. Playing
Now, the very first thing you have to do is get real with yourself and realize that for you, playing around on social media is NOT the same as RUNNING social media or CONTROLLING social media—pulling the puppet strings of the world.
Millions of people quit their jobs to start a business. They’re essentially being supported by their spouses. They go to work every day, and while they are changing bedpans at the hospital, they think their spouse is working when, in fact, they are just goofing off on Facebook all day. Doing stuff that sort of kind of looks like work.
And making zero money.
That person is like the chef who, instead of cooking, just stands in the kitchen and shovels food in their mouth all day.
Well, this is a book about making money on Facebook—not screwing around on Facebook. Facebook Ads is a serious endeavor. It’s a profession. You will get nowhere with those bad habits. You either pull the strings of the Matrix from outside the Matrix, or you’re in the Matrix being entertained by the Matrix. You can’t do both.
I deleted the standard Facebook app from my phone. I hardly ever use Facebook. When I do use Facebook, I use the phone browser instead of the app. I never log into Facebook as a standard user until after 5:30 p.m. Most days I don’t log in at all. But on the very same day, I may spend hours in the Facebook Interface and Facebook Advertising App being the chef and pulling the strings of the Matrix.
Never confuse activity with productivity. The two are not the same.
As a Facebook Advertiser, you are tasked with injecting creativity into the system, then measuring and tracking the results. You use your tracking tools—not checking out Facebook notifications every two seconds. Pay careful attention to what works and what doesn’t. Notice trends, not stuff. Accept your job, which is to influence the hypnotized masses who are coming to Facebook for their entertainment addiction.
You are not the person who comes to the restaurant and feeds their face for five hours. You work in the restaurant. You serve up great dishes. You only sample enough of the soup to know whether it tastes good or bad; then you go on and create more great cuisine.
Sorry if this sounds preachy. But I have many customers and clients whose productivity, sales, profits, and income absolutely skyrocketed after they:
■ deleted the Facebook app from their phone (along with Twitter, LinkedIn, and others).
■ realized that the world is in an incessant, never-ending conspiracy to rob you of time, attention, creativity, and mental space.
■ closed the Facebook tab in their browser.
■ entirely stopped using Facebook in the usual fashion during work hours.
■ blocked all email notifications from Facebook and other social media.
■ halted ALL smartphone notifications from all social media apps—no banners on the screen, no little red numbers on your app icons, no distractions.
Go on. Do all of the above—now! If you don’t, it will be devilishly difficult to master the key concepts in this book. Instead, Facebook will master you.
Facebook has taken over the world. It is the aquarium that lots of people live in. Facebook is your portal to influencing the world—their behavior, their opinions, their purchases, their relationships. You need to pull the levers without letting Facebook addiction take control of you. Facebook knows what its members look like, think, enjoy, and visit because it is the world’s largest:
■ Photo and video-sharing site
■ Thought-sharing site
■ Liking site
■ Linking site
■ Demographic and psychographic gathering engine
Even with Google’s gargantuan lead, Facebook will possibly become the world’s largest advertising site, especially as the internet continues its trajectory toward easy mobile device access.
FACEBOOK HAS REDEFINED ADVERTISING FOR 21ST CENTURY USERS
The majority of internet users access it via smartphones and tablets. This is bad news for all the old-school internet companies, but it’s good news for Facebook. Why?
Because Facebook was the FIRST company to put full-screen display ads in front of mobile phone users and get away with it on a daily basis. They have trained their users to accept this.
Nearly all other online ads are either in apps or tiny, inconsequential banner ads. Facebook puts display ads and videos right in the middle of the News Feed that are seen dozens of times every day. People actually share Facebook Ads (and good ads will get shared thousands of times)! Plus, in many situations, those ads don’t really seem like ads. Above the ad, the post may say, “Suzy Smith likes ACME corporation” so the ad has an implied endorsement. This works on a massive scale.
You can upload your customer’s phone numbers or email list to Facebook and Facebook will probably recognize about half of them. You can ask Facebook to target two million people who are in your target audience and Facebook can do that in an instant because of all the data it has already collected based on the users’ patterns on the platform.
As exciting as all of this is, it is important for advertisers to remember that Facebook did not build the site for advertisers. They built it for regular users and for themselves.
The talented young college grads Facebook hires from the world’s top universities don’t say, “I want to work at Facebook to help them maximize ad revenue.” Please know that even despite Facebook’s massive gains in the ad department, the company doesn’t exist simply to send you customers.
Regardless of why Zuckerberg built Facebook or what ideals his staffers may hold, the personal demographic information Facebook collects is tremendously valuable to advertisers.
Facebook is not stupid. It is more closely connected with its advertisers than any other platform on the planet. Facebook visionaries already have years’ worth of additional ideas to implement. How do we know this? We see the ideas publicly volunteered every day on Facebook Pages by Facebook Advertisers.
Facebook knows more about you than your husband or wife. They know what sites you visit; they know a great deal of what you buy; and they have bought data from all kinds of other companies and appended it to their database so they know what you respond to. Facebook even has suicide prevention tools, and its A.I. (artificial intelligence) may detect depression way before doctors or parents. They know the one million other people in the world who are most like you, like the same things you like, and buy the same things you buy.
Adult supervision on Facebook is minimal, which is probably why it is so absolutely brilliant. The company aggressively hires fresh college graduates—the brightest college grads on the planet. These are the smart kids—smarter than you, smarter than us. Some have never had a “real” job outside of Facebook. They have never tried to live off revenue generated by an ad. They do not feel your pain.
Remember that. It is really important.
To use Facebook’s paid advertising tools effectively, it is important to understand just how much its creators and designers are not really trying to help you. Fortunately, they do need cash, and we do need clicks, so we can get some great work done together. We focus on the clicks and they focus on connecting the world.
Facebook has the potential to be highly relevant for decades to come. Our rule of thumb is the founder’s rule: When you have a dynamic and visionary founder running a business, better to bet on that business continuing to be a success for as long as you see that founder at the helm.
We suggest that as long as you see Mark Zuckerberg engaged at Facebook, you should plan on Facebook being a dynamic and growing, competitive place to advertise.
Oh, Mark was born in 1984.
He will probably be around for a long, long time.
1984? It turns out that Little Brother is the one who’s watching you.
One Tool to Rule Them All
One Tool to rule them all,
One Tool to find them,
One Tool to bring them all,
And in the Facebook bind them.
This poem should haunt Google (I do know for a fact that Google is scared to death of Facebook). We wrote it as a bit of a taunt in the first edition of this book back in 2011 because so many people were predicting Facebook’s early demise. We predicted the opposite and were proved right. Facebook has indeed created one tool to bind the entire world together and Facebook, not Google, is in charge. Facebook currently reports that two billion people connect on the site every month. Two billion! Say that number a few times and let it sink in.
But wait, there’s more!
Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $16 billion in 2014. WhatsApp now has over 1.6 billion monthly active users, making it the most popular messaging app of all time. Facebook also acquired Instagram, which now has 1 billion active monthly users. In addition, Facebook has communities on Messenger and Oculus. Facebook Advertising tools are your gateway to all of these communities and more.
Facebook isn’t sitting still. If you look closely, you can see their hopes for the future. Facebook has acquired a whole series of smaller technical companies like these, acquiring technology for fitness tracking, speech and facial recognition, computer vision, augmented reality, video compression, and machine learning. And some people thought Snapchat had a chance!
The Facebook universe will continue to grow larger, more prevalent, and more powerful for years to come. One tool to rule them all, and in the Facebook bind them.
For example, smartphone Facebook users are usually continually logged in. As of the holiday season of 2019, Facebook reported mobile advertising was 93 percent of their total advertising revenue. This is no big surprise as mobile users are connected to Facebook nearly 24/7. Facebook on the phone is the only way to reach some of your customers. Plus, you can find customers you would never have imagined, such as visitors from another state currently traveling through your city within ten miles of your business. You reach them without even knowing it with a, “Come in for a special 30 percent discount!” ad.
Facebook users now check into your business when they visit you, without you even asking them to do so. No more pathetic “please like me” signs. Mobile makes it easy. When users check into your business, they automatically announce to their friends where they are and what they are doing. Friday nights in the big city need never be lonely again.
But wait, there’s even more!
Facebook is supporting their community in big ways. They’ve made it simple to livestream video with Facebook Live, creating a whole new media form. Websites and apps can leverage Facebook’s login. This is amazingly powerful now that so many users never log out of Facebook. Capture your customer’s attention with live video, collect critical contact information, and get them to call you, register for events, and even donate to you fast and easy. Literally, it’s all at the touch of a button.
One tool to rule them all, and in the Facebook bind them.
YOUR MISSION, SHOULD YOU CHOOSE TO ACCEPT IT
So, what do you do with all of this information about Facebook? Simple. Your mission is to buy a click for $1, turn it into $2, and then make more profit than your competitors do from your $2. This is your mission and it has moved to Facebook. It is a new platform, but a very old mission.
The rest is just strategy and tactics. Many existing strategies and tactics that we have taught to over 100,000 Google advertisers work directly in Facebook. For more info see: Ultimate Guide to Google Ads 6th Edition (Entrepreneur Press, November 2020). For example, you need to understand your sales funnel, craft a compelling ad, have a focused goal for your landing page, and track and follow up with your leads and customers. More importantly, you want to do this automatically.
We will teach you the strategy and tactics required to fulfill your mission: to get those clicks and to turn them into customers and sales.
Some tactics, especially those built around audience targeting and bidding strategies, have changed dramatically for Facebook. Don’t worry, we will show you the secrets we have found to be a successful advertiser on Facebook.
Facebook has dramatically simplified online advertising by making audience targeting and bidding quite easy. Your number-one job is creating ads and offers.
Your Mission, a Penny at a Time
Those who like numbers will appreciate how powerful your fundamental mission is. Depending on the size of your market, your mission may also be stated as, “To buy a click for $1 and to reliably and repeatedly turn it into $.01 worth of pure profit.”
This is how pro gamblers think. If they can find a game where betting a dollar nets them a penny, they are in heaven. They sit there for hours and hours playing round after round trying to bet as much as possible to earn that 1-percent net.
They even have a name for it. They call it “grinding.” The best part about grinding when you’re a digital marketer is that you do not have to actually sit at a table in a smoke-filled room. Digital grinding happens in that area of the web now called the “cloud,” and clouds are much nicer than smoke-filled rooms.
Also, you do not have to live in Vegas. In the online world, the game comes to you.
Think about this for a moment: a 1-percent net ROI (return on investment) may be achieved within a matter of minutes from when the investment was made. What is the return on a dollar, on an annual basis, that can bring 1 percent every three minutes? The figure is so large it makes even Goldman Sachs blush. A penny, if enough clicks are available, is a fortune. Empires are built on a 1-percent net profit.
Don’t despise making a penny, especially if you can make it reliably and repeatedly. Instead, focus on how to make a lot more pennies. Focus on how to get a lot more clicks.
Perhaps you can do that on Facebook?
For your sake, we hope so. Because advertising on Facebook is actually a lot of fun.
For some advertisers, using Facebook paid advertising to find new customers is also stunningly easy. Facebook Advertising may be a great fit that will cause new customers to fall into your lap. Facebook Advertising is almost always a perfect strategy to retarget and nurture traffic from any source.
