/biz/ - Business & Finance

>>29398495
FB has always been a shitshow, but at least a few years ago it was functional and fluid. Now it just looks like a cobbled together mess, there's no ui consistency, their flagship products instagram and facebook dont work together properly from the perspective of an online retailer (you basically have to do everything twice to setup their commerce bullshit, and its still worse than shopify's, which they dont properly integrate either unlike amazon and ebay which both work fine), their ads are borderline scams and way overpriced, etc. Its just a giant tire fire shitshow and I dont know how their stock just keeps slowly climbing.

Ill maybe post some sources for the ad fraud later if the thread gets popular, but they basically just say they're only getting traffic from your target audience, and even if you have "expanded targeting" turned off, they'll just show your ads to whoever the fuck regardless of audience just to burn through your daily budget. As I said earlier, this is the opposite of google's approach, which will just stop showing your ads if there arent any searches from relevant audience segments, and if they are getting lots of volume for that particular audience, they can use up to 2x your daily budget to make it more worthwhile that day (this approach is far FAR more effective).

Its not a secret that scaling with facebook ads is mostly impossible because of this, unless you're at the point of absolute endgame entire country targeting (ie, coca-cola, mcdonalds, etc), whereas youtube/google search ads can basically be scaled to the moon because of how much better their targeting algorithms are.

Every time I am on Facebook I'm completely lost in bloat and useless features.
VK, which is a literal clone of 2006 Facebook, is a way more useful/usable social network.
I don't understand what all those employees are doing all day, and how a trillion dollar company cannot into proper UI.

>>29398947
ya exactly this. And its because they've allowed themselves to have all their departments and teams be so segmented and separated. They have a different, dedicated team working on every single page, and that's all they do all day long, so they just keep straying further and further away from each other. So ya, every page is basically its own separate product, and I imagine its left to a small team of competent devs to try and string all the bullshit together after its made

>>29398495
FB is such a pile of shit. I've never once felt like it was worthwhile running ads for my e-commerce business either there or on IG. Complete waste of money.

BAT is unironically the solution

>>29399414
Although, the one thing they have going for them is a respectable P/E ratio with huge cash reserves, but I have a feeling a lot of the faith in their company is directly from those cash reserves, and once they start getting eaten up, that faith will dwindle.

FB has no monetization at all except for advertising. They have no facebook version of AWS, a shitty ecommerce platform (if you can even call it that), instagram is the closest thing to a youtube-esque cashcow, and even that they struggle to monetize effectively, and 90% of ig is just instawhores trying to shill their asses, or pajeet-tier botted meme pages. There's just no value there. The only thing they make money on is from businesses giving them money to shill their products, and almost every business is so sick of their bullshit that they're pulling out. Just try to find a major brand on the ads library, they're just not there anymore. 90% of it is scamcourse "gurus" or get rich quick scams

>>29400207
There was a time when they worth it, and I think a case can still be made for influencers (actual legitimate micro-influencers, not meme pages with 5mil pajeets), but those are basically OTC advertising sales, and fb gets nothing from that. If they pivoted into supporting their IG influencers better, like how google does, they could maybe save it, since smaller, semi-popular influencers tend to have really dedicated, motivated fanbases.

But ya, its basically just lighting money on fire now. Here were my CPM's when I shut down my fb ads shortly after black friday. As I said, black friday was over, these are actually less than I was getting a week before I took this screenshot. For a frame of reference, $185/1000 impressions is about the same price as a super bowl ad, lol.

>>29398495
I wouldn't short it, but I got out because it has been poisoned. Every day is another bad story. The reason I wouldn't short it is, the balance sheet is godlike and they are growing earnings with great margins. There's still almost 3billion active users all over the world and FB has smart people figuring out ways to squeeze profit out of those users. FB is like 20 forward P/E right now. If you look at fundamentals, this thing should be $350. I just got tired of looking at daily headlines of FB this FB that.

>>29400991
>the balance sheet is godlike
>FB is like 20 forward P/E right now.
This is literally all they have going for them though (which admittedly is a lot and makes me nervous, and is basically the sole reason for making this thread). There's almost no large corporations using facebook ads anymore though, which is 100% of their revenue. They're going down the road towards taboola-tier, but with google prices, something has to give. When none of the people giving you money are actually happy, there's something wrong with your business.

But ya, they do have the money to turn it around, but I just don't know if zuck has it in him to perform the necessary measures to fix the company. I predict more of a slow bleed like how microsoft went from $50~ at the height of the dotcom bubble to $16~ in 2009. But the one thing that FB doesn't have is a myriad of monetizable products. No one wants to pay for anything they have to offer, and they aren't good at the one thing that makes them money. They have no actually sellable products.

>>29401863
>They have no actually sellable products.
other than data*, which as said, they arent doing a good job of segmenting or leveraging, and companies like apple are actively sabotaging.

I suspect longterm it's going to be a the place where only the new boomers, Gen X and Millenials post. But hat still means it has gas in the tank for 20 years, but Zoomers and Gen A are going to use different platforms for certain.

That said, Facebook is barely using its data right now. Right now it just sells it on, if it set up it's own insurance functions it could potentially be huge.

>>29400790
Yeah, definitely agree on the micro-influencers. I follow some accounts with relatively few followers (10k-50k) that do ridiculously good engagement numbers because their followers are so damn dedicated.

I've got about 21k followers, 100% organic. I feel like a lot of them are inactive accounts or just not very dedicated, and I don't have much growth either (lots of follows/unfollows, but the total number of followers hardly ever creeps up, over the past year or so). Sales are good, but our engagement isn't where it should be at all with that amount of followers. Still, I've always managed better results just by being extremely active on social media, vs. ads on either IG or FB. Maybe I missed the FB boat (started the business in 2016).

Getting off on a tangent there about general frustration with social media, but anyway, fuck Facebook. I wouldn't use IG or Twitter either if I didn't have to for my business.

Thanks OP. I was thinking about buying ads for my B2B business, but good to hear what I suspected about FB ads

I literally work for facebook ads, Ive probably talked with you before on their chat or email. It true theyre suffering issues but they make obscene money, believe me.

For every random fuckers ad account or profile thats disabled for no reason there are loads of companies who happily pay 100,000 or 1,000,000+ for ads per month

>>29400991
>There's still almost 3billion active users all over the world

Yeah and WoW has 15m subscribers lol anon

>>29398495
>and their support is non-existent unless you're one of the lucky ones who get a customer support live chat option (if you dont spend enough money on their platform you can just get fucked)
I just saw this. There are loads of people who get on chat who have literally spent 0$. The threshold to get on chat is tiny.

>>29402132
>but our engagement isn't where it should be at all with that amount of followers
desu unless you're a woman with a nice ass, you wont get lots of engagement on instagram, lol. Like, just think about how you browse insta, you probably just scroll through and like/comment on maybe 1 out of 100 things you see. It also could be the fact that most of your followers just aren't seeing your posts because of fb's retarded, overbearing display algorithms. One thing I've heard a few people mention (and found some success with) is that its better to rapid-fire posts rather than space them out through the day. A lot of people will, say, queue up 2-3 posts to post a few hours apart throughout the day using something like tailwind, when really you want to just drop them all at once to snowball your engagement, since engaged posts will make other recent posts more visible (its so fucking stupid and I cant believe that were at a point where stuff like I just typed is a thing, but it is)

ive never had a facebook and deleted instagram three years ago. doomp eet

>>29402384
>>29402566
weird, I only have it on one of my business managers, and there was an almost 9 month period where I couldn't get live support despite spending like $500/day on fb ads. The chat with live support button was just gone from my business manager, lol

I will say though, fb's customer support is actually pretty top-notch if you can get it. Ive never had an issue that wasn't solved right away by their staff, they really do go above and beyond.

>>29398947
vk was great, don't use it now, so idk how things are. Western facebook are convoluted trash, i literally can not comprehend how you can you end up with shit like facebook if you trying to design usefull app. This tech culture is a fuckin cancer, i'm pretty surf it us do bad, because those fuckin onions drinkers who work there are inventing new work to do for themselves. I fuckin hate instagram marketing fags who "uh oh instagram new algoriyhm, very important, uou can now swipe with your fingers covered in feces if you have "verified poc" badge but only sideways" all their new updates are useless pole of fuckin shit. Useless miniscule changes no one asked for. Uhhh i would strangle those faggots with my own hands

>>29402573
Didn't know that about spamming posts, might give it a shot sometime. I usually post in the early evenings, or mid-day on weekends.

I hear you on not being a woman with huge tits or a nice ass. I follow quite a few of them, lol. But I also follow a bunch of independent artists and other small business owners in the same niche as me, who apparently have really hardcore followings. They get crazy engagement numbers (unless they're buying likes, but they often get a shitload of comments as well, which seem authentic). I dunno. It all seems like witchcraft for the most part. I guess if it was easy to figure out, everyone would do well on social media.

>>29403637
Ya Im not even really that great at it either and just kinda set them up because if people google my companies, they expect to see company facebook and instagram pages, it helps a lot with appearing legitimate/trustworthy. The only one that gets any real interest is my art page, and even then I dont really know what Im doing to "build a following" or whatever other than posting good art, I have no real social media strategy outside of that lol (its mostly just a passion-project though, Im a way way better media buyer than social media influencer)

>>29402760
Hmm, that is weird. Usually access to support is based on User profile and not Business Manager. If it was a case where you had access to email support but not chat, it couold be that chat was too busy or tech issues with it or something like that. Usually people access support from the fb help website though, not from their Business Manager. I think the button is in the resources section of the help centre

>
I will say though, fb's customer support is actually pretty top-notch if you can get it. Ive never had an issue that wasn't solved right away by their staff, they really do go above and beyond.
It definitely depends what site you get sent to and what agent as well. If you ever run into an agent who doesnt seem to know what theyre talking about, it can be a good idea to just come back on and you might get someone better. Some agents where I work are just clueless and some are really good.

>>29403637
>>29402573
Generally organic reach is affected by the engagement you get. The most important thing with organic reach is that when you post on ig or fb that as much as your pages or accounts followers engage as possible. Thats why sometimes its not actually a good thing to have loads of followers or page likes if most of those people dont interact with your content. Its kind of like a positive or negative feedback loop but if fb sees that the people who follow or like your page interact with your posts then it will show those posts more and so on. As far as I know, timing doesnt affect it that much but spamming posts over and over wont work.

>>29398495
I think you might hurt yourself trying to short FB. They've got enough data on people to build crazy predictive models and ontology networks at this point, and shouldn't need to use real user data for pretty much every generation (outside of the youngest of Zoomers).
That and all the dumb zoomers and millenials are still on Instagram and can still be clustered accordingly.

>>29402132
imagine the smell

>>29398495
Drop facebook, put money into twitter
If you didn't realize, literally everything you see on the news people were talking about on twitter 1-2 days before
Our politicians and media are obsessed with it, watch the news tonight and see how many tweets they pull up
I think Trump has got them hooked on it

>>29404300
>If it was a case where you had access to email support but not chat
this was it, and then I just wouldn't get email responses (there was one week where every ad I'd try to post would get autoflagged and my account shut down, then the next day my account would be active again, but my ads would get instaflagged and start the process over again, it was super strange). I also may just be getting lucky with support agents, and I've only had to use it like 3 or 4 times in the last year, but each one was as helpful as can be expected

And that makes sense about engagement. I also wasn't talking about spamming, but I've noticed definite increases in engagement if I post 2 or 3 posts within a few minutes, than if I post one, wait a few hours, then post another (you almost always get the most likes in the first 30 minutes unless it randomly goes viral after the fact)

>>29404020
Same, I have no real strategy other than I just try to post stuff I hope people will find interesting - my art, product announcements, etc.

>>29404300
That makes sense. It's a little bit like going viral, I guess - the more people engage with something, the more people will see it, and so on. I suppose that's the point behind those IG pods, where you and a group of people all like and comment on each other's posts in the hopes that it will boost them so more people see them.

Would you recommend scrubbing my follower list of inactive accounts, then? I feel like only about half of my 20k-ish followers are actually active.

When is Facebook Libra supposed to launch? If that shit fails it could send them tumbling down

>>29404727
Yeah sometimes cases can get "lost" in the system if agents aren't careful with them. If you email the thread and you're still not getting any reply, it might be because the agent thinks they can't do anything more for you e.g if your ad account was disabled and even after appeal it was re-enabled, if you kept emailing back after asking for another review, you might not get any response because the agent knows that is going to change.
The policy system in general can be weird, some people will get ad accounts disabled as soon as they have 1 ad disapproved and some other people have loads of ads disapproved and nothing happens
>>29405536
It might be worth getting rid of inactive followers yeah, try to have as a high % of your followers interact with your posts as possible. Also maybe try to replicate previously succesful posts in terms of the timing of the post or style of the post

>>29405880
wasnt it veto'd by congress or something? Im canadian and not really sure how exactly your politics/legal system really works, or if congress denying something constitutes a legal judgement or whatever

>>29398495
I gave up on Facebook ads. I sold 100x as much merch by just making a meme attached to the product and being funny on Twitter. I spent hundreds on ads and made no sales. Twitter could sells 3k of an item from a single tweet.

>>29398495
dude instagram and facebook i cant see it falling that much

>>29398495
You short fraudulent companies, not shit stain companies.

>>29407382
the fraud is their claimed ad targeting. Different audiences have different costs associated with them, some dramatically different, so if I can sell $15 traffic to a $5 audience (while saying its a $15 audience), I can make a huge return that way.

https://adage.com/article/news/facebook-employee-called-inflated-ad-metrics-deeply-wrong/2315621

>>29398495
Facebook literally prints money so far. They have 0 debt and grow quarter after quarter as boomers rage over Trump and thirsty virgins watch ass on Instagram.
They pretty much control social media and ad space for years to come.

My outlook is fairly positive, but I thank you very much for your perspective as an actual business owner. I only see earnings numbers and revenue streams and actually thought companies are fairly happy with FB.

At worst I can see stagnation, and I short puts so I am happy with that too.

>>29398495
Facebook (the social network) isn't all of FB (the company)'s holdings.
they also own Oculus and Instagram, for example.
shorting may be justified, but not sure i buy your bear thesis.

>>29400314
Wow I had the same thought. Didn't know that's how the ad service works on sites like FB, but if OP isn't larping something like BAT would be a godsend to people like him.

>>29398495
>shorting a stock that is guaranteed to go up
lol

Whats a Facebook?

>using facebook
Holy shit. Have you seen their recent ad campaign. Who the fuck are they trying to capture with this shit? Please take 30 seconds to watch this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWMUybibWfY&ab_channel=FacebookApp

>>29400314
>>29408668
ya a blockchain-based decentralized advertising service is definitely needed to keep the industry honest. You dont really see the demand side of it other than what these platforms say the bids are (if that even, its usually just complete blind guess and check, or overbidding to guarantee the top bids). The problem is that the biggest content display/delivery networks (ie, google, youtube, facebook, instagram, twitter) all sell ads as their prime source of revenue. They aren't going to take too kindly to being undercut and are just going to filter pages displaying their ads from showing up in their searches.

ie, its going to be nearly impossible for their ads to actually get seen anywhere

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>>29408799
Looks like FB is the LGBTQFGHIJKLMNOP mecca.

>>29409223
Ive obviously been getting shilled with the same canadian newton ads on 4chan as you have the last 6 months, fellow leaf. Why wouldnt I just set up 2 accounts to get $50?

>>29409367
I dunno man. I was given a referral code by a nice Anon here and am only trying to return the favour.