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3 Myths About Facebook The Company Wishes Would Go Away
Ever since Facebook went public earlier this year — and was finally liberated from the SEC-required "quiet period" that all companies must go through when offering stock — Facebook has been trying to chase down several untrue rumors about how its business works.
As the old saying goes, a lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on.
We sat down recently with Carolyn Everson, Facebook's vp/global marketing solutions, and asked her what the most common misconceptions were among advertisers about the way Facebook works.
She told us that these are the three of the biggest:
1. "Facebook ads don't work."
Everson says: "I see it in the press sometimes. I will hear a marketer say, 'Prove it to me, show me how Facebook marketing works.' To me that's code for 'I haven't believed it yet, or I haven't seen enough data.' And my team now is equipped globally with literally hundreds of examples and proof points of how Facebook advertising works [for] everything from Samsung launching a product down to your small/medium business trying to drive people into their stores."
2. "Mobile is bad for Facebook."
To be fair, this myth was started by Facebook itself, when it warned in its IPO papers that had not yet properly monetized mobile. It warned again in Q2 that mobile may "negatively affect" revenue. Since then, however, mobile has turned out to be huge for Facebook.
Everson says: "Mobile is fantastic for monetization. Fourteen percent of our revenue from the third quarter was from mobile. The CPMs are higher in mobile across the board. The performance in the news feed on mobile are 8 to 10X. Let me give you some interesting stats. Rosetta Stone, language provider, did an offers product. They got 560,000 claims, 98 percent of them via mobile. Lawson's is a Japanese convenient store, kind of like 7-11, they got 598,000 claims, 93 percent from mobile. It is a very powerful way for our marketers to reach our users and I will tell you that when I sit with the client council members, Keith Weed at Unilever or Marc Pritchard at P&G, any of the top CMOs, they are entirely focused on how Facebook can help them in emerging markets … Clearly more people are joining Facebook on mobile, so mobile's been very positive from a user growth standpoint."
3. "Facebook only works for brand awareness."
Everson says too many advertisers think Facebook is only good at generating vague brand image impressions, and it's not for driving direct sales. But she believes Facebook has uses throughout marketing's customer "funnel":
"The third myth, Facebook only works for top-of-the-funnel objectives, for brand awareness, for people having conversations or earned media. What we have now demonstrated consistently is we deliver throughout the entire funnel. "
Disclosure: The author owns Facebook stock.
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