I came across this slightly dated narrative from someone who has spent quite a bit of time, and quite a lot of money on Facebook advertising.

I have to admit there are some great tips and ideas (link below) that if used right can save you an awful lot of time, anguish, and probably budget.

My personal favourite is;

Don't focus on vanity metrics. Your Impressions, Reach and even Click-through rate don't mean anything if your campaigns can't bring you the results they're optimized for. You can only measure your social media ROI by looking at how well your ads are converting. Keep an eye on frequency, relevance score and CPA. Look at the click-through rate and conversion rate together - if many people click on your ads but not enough are converting, it might be time to refresh your creative.

If I told you that Ad Fraud is forecast to rise from $42bn this year (2019) to $100Bn by 2023, yup you read that number right  - $100 Billion by 2023 and the industry has little control over it other than the obvious, you might be thinking the same as me 'why do companies still accept this level of fraud'?.

Marc Pritchard, the chief brand officer at Procter & Gamble, one of the largest advertisers in the world. Ads, he said, are often irrelevant and sometimes “just silly, ridiculous or stupid.” 

“We tried to change the advertising ecosystem by doing more ads, and all that did was create more noise,” he said.

Social selling despite what you think isn't actually about 'selling' its the consumers way of telling us that the digitally intrusive advertising industry's way of trying to inform us about they're products and services has fundamentally changed  FOREVER....

Social Selling has more to do with understanding how the traditional buying process for B2B/B2C and now D2C is no more. 

Today's generations know nothing other than the free to access, free to use, lo-cost, no-cost digital world that many from previous generations still find somewhat bewildering. 

Especially in multi-channel retail.

One of the key reasons people are still hooked on the drug of 'paid media' is the dynamic hit you get as you review what's worked and what hasn't - hence the tips in the link.

Vanity metrics seem to be the default KPI for many a business today, you know the ones where the marketing team show the pie chart for the board who are impressed at all those 'likes' from the latest campaign. along with the size of reach from that 'influencer' campaign you just paid for.

Organic reach is indeed somewhat of a slow burner which is why brands still spend an inordinate amount of time and money on paid media - after all you can't really tell the board to wait 6 months before someone buys something can you?

The thing about organic reach is that the mindset should be more about adding value to a tribe, it should be focused on building relationships that in turn will help foster other relationships outside of your first degree circle. If it's done right your KPI will be based not just on engagement (that's how you start to build the relationship) but more so around the value and quality of the in-bound. 

Commerce from content is already here, at the moment brands are still spending budget to get consumers to the website, but social commerce is already changing this and as buying behaviours change in favour of content where will you be?