) It’s been floating in my head for a while… The title, Growing Pains of Facebook, has been haunting my thoughts for a couple weeks. I’ve been working on Facebook for some of my clients for several months and I had a tonne of comments (negative and positive) to share. What better way than to simply blog about it!
The emergence of a new platform, in any field, is cause for celebration. To me it represents growth, evolution, thirst for change and most importantly it is NEW. For all the ones who had been proclaiming that web 2.0 was here, it was a complete confirmation. Social Media is still defining itself but key players are identifying themselves and evolving. Facebook took off like a rocket and everyone was holding on to it, trying to be part of its explosion. We can definitely thank students for their ability to gravitate towards trends quickly and for their huge (not always meaningful) networks.
With change come difficulties ). As I began to use Facebook to advertise my clients I was very pleased to discover the low CPCs but very frustrated by the interface. But since money talks ) I keep buying ads because clients are pleased with the results (so was I) even though the CTRs are very low. Often enough, I login and notice new improvements to the Ad Manager interface. Reporting is now much easier but still at a very basic level. Billing still requires a calculator since the interface does not allow a quick isolation of data. The possibility of an advertiser account does not exist which forces us to mix our personal profiles with work. (A company profile for the purpose of advertising cannot be created, trust me, mine was rudely disabled with no possibility of recuperating data) But the possibility of targeting profiles by interests was my favourite feature of all. Unfortunately CPCs have sky rocketed lately and the benefits of Facebook ads have to be re-evaluated.
Since the flow of new applications within this social network is going strong we can deduce that Facebook will easily continue to offer new innovative ways to reach and market to a precisely targeted audience. From Bumper Stickers to Snowball Fights and passing through so many…there’s an infinite amount of possibilities within this social network. Another great advantage of the emergence of a new platform; it promotes the creation of other similar yet different platforms like Twitter, Linkedin, Plurk and more…much more! So maybe I shouldn’t call it the growing pains but more something like The Growing Delights of Facebook )
