Should You be Using Facebook?

16 Mar Should You be Using Facebook?

Posted at 15:07h in Digital Marketing, Houzz Marketing, Social Media Marketing by Jim Oborny

You may have heard about how Facebook is changing the algorithms which affect what information people will now see in their newsfeeds. This article is not about that. It did however make me realize that many companies are wasting time and energy.

You see, Facebook is basically turning into a pay-to-play platform for businesses. You want people to see your posts? Then buy ads. That’s it in a nutshell.

Before you run out and start figuring out which ads to create there is something more important that you should do.

You need to determine if you should even be using Facebook for your business!

Sorry to pick on Facebook but this really applies to all of the social media that you are using for your business. You need to determine if you really need to have eight different social media icons on your website. Do you need to devote any time and energy to the various platforms thinking that you may someday sell a project because of them.

Analyze Your Social Media

We had the idea, for one of our construction-related clients that we needed to analyze the quality of the various social media platforms in order to determine which we should focus on.

Here is how we did it.

We analyzed their referral traffic using Google Analytics. We reviewed 12 months of website traffic. For each referral source we looked at three metrics: Pages Viewed, Time, Spent, and Bounce Rate. Then we compared this data to their customer leads database.

We looked at the following social media (leads sources):

Pinterest
LinkedIn
Facebook
Google Adwords
Google Organic Referrals (from real SEO)
Houzz

I will first tell you the conclusions that we drew from this research and then I will give you some details.

By the way, I am not advising you to just stop using some social media platforms but rather I would tell you to do your own research and analyze your data to achieve better marketing results.

Conclusions:

Google organic traffic was their largest source of traffic and leads
Houzz generates the highest quality of leads based on the 3 metrics that we were looking at (Pages Viewed: 3.30, Time Spent: 2:46, Bounce Rate: 31%)
We could devote less energies to some of the platforms as determined by their “quality” and confirmed by our leads database

Remember, it is not always about quantity! Quality matters.

I’ve heard from many people “we get alot of traffic from Pinterest (for example)”.

But if they would take the time to analyze their traffic from Pinterest they would see that it may not the highest of quality. In this case, Pinterest had the lowest numbers (Pages Viewed: 1.23, Time Spent: 0:21, and Bounce Rate: 85%). We also looked at leads attributed to Pinterest which was ZERO.

Based on all of this research, we recommended to our client that we focus our energies on the various marketing channels that yielded the best results as determined by our quality rating and by confirming this with their leads database.