Facebook Advertising Ineffective

I've been meaning to post this for a while.

I have become somewhat skeptical of Facebook and social media advertising.

Initially I found it was cheaper than Google Adwords and provided more profiling power. At least initially it appeared effective.

However despite dozens of clicks delivered in a very short space of time, after tracking conversions I have found that it has been about 1/10 as effective in conversion than standard banner ads and Google Adwords.

So the overall value of Facebook advertising, at least that I've found, is minimal.

This is a shame as it seemed like the platform had plenty of promise. Perhaps this is due to the type of advertising and the frame of mind of consumers using social media.

I have, however had success with Facebook Business Pages where your customers can become fans of your business. This has worked well. Perhaps the two could work better in conjunction than a standard Facebook ad. All the same though, I've been slightly burnt by my Facebook advertising experience.

Can't find the Create Group feature in the New Facebook ?

You're not alone there. After the recent Facebook layout change I simply couldn't find the link to it anywhere. Not in the homepage, applications or even (where you'd expect to find it) in the groups section .....

However after searching Facebook and the web extensively for the create group feature I found this direct link which you might find useful:
http://www.facebook.com/groups/create.php

Bookmark it.

The new interface on Facebook is a disgrace. Groups and communities are a big part of what makes Facebook popular but it has been overlooked in favour of a focus on the Twitter style status updates system. As a result I've already moved to Orkut for social networking and Twitter for microblogging. They obviously don't do much user testing over there at Facebook HQ .....

Unless they find a way to quickly change direction from these latest changes I doubt it will be too long before the ship hits the Zuckerberg so to speak.

Easy Social Bookmarking using AddThis or ShareThis

Social bookmarking can drive more traffic to your website with people being able to tell others about your site by word-of-mouth. There are plenty of applications online, like Delicious, StumbledUpon and Newsvine to name a couple.

One way to make it easier for people to bookmark your website is to make it convenient for them to do it and offer as many popular social bookmarking options as you can.

This can make it difficult with a lack of available screen real estate to work with.

Fortunately there are plenty of drop-in applications out there.

The most popular is "AddThis" and I personally like to use this. It is responsive, looks great and can be easily added to Blogger, Wordpress, MySpace and a whole range of other Web 2.0 applications.

Another popular option is "ShareThis", which tries to use an icon to make it familiar. Unfortunately, unlike RSS icons, there isn't really a standard icon for social bookmarking and more people use AddThis at the moment, meaning that the ShareThis icon is unlikely to take off.

But check out the AddThis facility that I've used at the bottom of each post.

New Facebook review - in a word - " it sucks"

I've tried hard to like the new Facebook. I sampled it for a couple of weeks when they first introduced it, but decided it wasn't for me and then reverted to the old, familiar style.

You see, it just didn't let me easily access the applications, the wall, my news feeds, groups and all the other things I used to like about Facebook. It used to be on the one handy page, now in their pursuit of cleanliness, the interface is in fact an ugly mess.

About a week ago, Facebook, probably the most popular social networking application among adults, forced their new design onto their millions of users.

Well it seems that I am not alone. A protest group within Facebook called "I hate the new Facebook" has over a million members !

The Facebook people just can't seem to turn a trick. They've been criticised for privacy issues related to their news feeds and their horrible use of social advertising.

My use of Facebook is getting less and less, while I have been using applications like Linkedin more. If it wasn't a place where I have all my old contacts, I would have stopped using it long ago. Bebo and MySpace are unfortunately not for me. Come to think of it, should any new social networking application that is half decent has the ability to import my "friends" and contacts, I'd be to it in a minute.