Facebook Not As Good At Reach Building As You Might Think

Gyi Tsakalakis
July 5, 2011

This weekend, a watched Bloomberg Game Changers profile of Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive officer of Facebook Inc:

And while I found the biographical profile of one of the world's youngest billionaires to be fascinating, it was shadowed by my intrigue for facebook itself.

You've probably seen the numbers 100 times, but nonetheless here they are at the time of this post:

And so, it seems logical to draw the conclusion, "wow facebook has amazing reach-building potential." So you create a facebook business page, you start sharing (spamming) your friends, and perhaps you even start investing in facebook advertising. After all, facebook holds the largest and most sophisticated database of consumer information in the history of the world. But does it work?

In Facebook Conversation DO NOT Lead To More Views, Dan Zarella shares the results of his recent study:

As the data shows, (and as EdgeRank suggests) the amount of "conversation" that happens on your Facebook posts has nothing to do with the number of people who will see it. Once again, we find that conversations have very little (if anything) to do with reach-building social media marketing effectiveness.

Does this surprise you? Should it?

While the results of this study certainly aren't an argument for not participating on facebook, what they do seem to show is that more feedback on a post, does not mean more views.

Like other social media marketing, to me, facebook is simply not about exposure marketing. In other words, it's just not the right channel for getting your message out to the maximum number of people and driving visitor traffic to your website or blog.

While publishing, sharing, participating, and engaging on facebook on business-related subjects MAY prove valuable to some law firms, it's simply not on my short list for reach building.

Gyi Tsakalakis
Co-Founder of AttorneySync
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