Nate Elliot is at it again. The Forrester analyst created quite a stir back in October when he criticized Facebook for not offering marketers enough value for their efforts. Now he’s doubling down on that claim with yet another scathing take-down.
“Is there any doubt now that Facebook has abandoned social marketing, and that its paid ad products aren’t delivering results for most marketers?” says Elliot in his post. He points to the constant changes in Facebook’s News Feed algorithm, which have made it extremely difficult for brands to organically deliver content to their followers. “This month, Ogilvy released data showing that the brand pages they manage reach just 6% of fans,” says Elliot. “For pages with more than 500,000 fans, Ogilvy says reach stands at just 2%.”
The drop in organic reach for brands is a deliberate one from Facebook, as it not-so-gently nudges companies towards paying to deliver their content instead of hoping to rely on its innate share-ability. However, Elliot contends that the paid efforts to get fans and likes aren’t really helping either.
“Many of those fans don’t seem to interact with people or with branded content — they seem to do little other than “like” thousands and thousands of brand pages,” says Elliot. “The conclusion some marketers are coming to: The paid ads Facebook encourages them to buy often lead to “fake” fans generated by “like farms.”
Facebook has responded to the allegations of fake likes before, saying it was working hard to eliminate their presence on the platform. But it has admitted in the past that organic reach was only going to decrease for content put out by brands, which makes things considerably difficult for marketers.
While Elliot has a few valid points about Facebook’s ineffectiveness, it’s telling that he talks about how only a few brands were willing to come forward and criticize the platform. It just goes to show that much like Google, brands are at the mercy of Facebook and its mysterious content ranking algorithm. However, if brands truly are dissatisfied with Facebook as an ad platform, they should be pretty confident criticizing it. After all, they’re the ones with the money. It’s too simplistic to think Facebook would downgrade them in the News Feed ranking simply because they anger the Facebook gods. As Eli Pariser, the founder of Upworthy said in his conversation with David Carr at SXSW, Facebook’s ranking system is a machine, not an engineer turning a knob or pushing a button that says “Let’s f*** [this brand] in the rankings”
