With roughly 3 million daily active users by October 2022, Facebook (owned by the company now known as Meta) is easily still the largest social network on the internet. However, despite its continued growth, many businesses are now pulling out of Facebook altogether. Before you make the knee-jerk decision to follow suit, consider the potential risks. In the end, it may actually be a smarter move to stick around.
Facebook Is an Important Marketing Platform
Not only is the sheer size of Facebook’s user base a major draw for marketers, but it also has a proven history of delivering good business results. Facebook’s business features have made ecommerce more accessible, and they were one of the first platforms to make it easy to target advertisements and monitor campaigns with built-in metrics.
Facebook also remains the leading advertising platform in terms of sales revenue. According to 2022 data, they boast a 9.21% conversion rate, have the highest ROI of all competitors, and brought in roughly $113 million dollars in ad revenue last year.
Facebook is always developing new ideas and tools to help businesses succeed. Everything from the Shopping feature to Facebook Groups presents new opportunities for marketers, and there’s no shortage of money to be made.
With all that in mind, why are businesses still choosing to leave the platform?
Why They’re Leaving: Current Challenges in Facebook Marketing
Companies have given various reasons for their decision to leave Facebook, but there are some common pain points among them.
Some of the challenges advertisers say they face include:
- Loss of website traffic. Marketers say that engagement via a Facebook page draws too much focus toward the platform instead of to their company websites. This limits marketing opportunities, puts a middleman between the brand and the consumer, and could mean fewer conversions.
- Reduced ecommerce revenue. In addition to declining sales numbers, some marketers feel that Facebook simply takes too much of the pie.
- Time-consuming management. Some companies say it simply takes too much time to manage a business profile and marketing campaigns on Facebook. The labor investment is too high to make the revenue worthwhile.
- Misleading, unclear numbers. On social media, a follower doesn’t always represent an active relationship. It’s not clear how many of a company’s “fans” are active customers who spend money with them. There’s also no way to be sure whether a profile is real or fake.
- Poor public perception and/or ethical concerns. In addition to privacy concerns and claims of unethical behavior, some also see Facebook as having poor-quality content, with too many memes and too much misinformation.
Why You Should Stay: The Potential Drawbacks of Leaving
Despite what other companies say about their mass exodus from Facebook, there are plenty of reasons to stay with the platform. As they move on, they could be leaving behind a lot of opportunities for those who remain.
Here are a few key reasons why you should shirk the trend and stick with Facebook/Meta advertising:
- You’d be losing a huge audience. Leaving means walking away from Facebook’s enormous user base. Not only do they simply have a higher user count than other platforms, that broad range of demographics may be difficult to find elsewhere.
Staying also gives you an opportunity to pick up where others left off. First-party click data shows that Facebook is still a huge part of the buying funnel, and the Sprout Social Index reports that 65% of marketers and 71% of consumers plan to use Facebook most often in 2023. If your competitors have already jumped ship, you can actually benefit from the ad inventory they’ve left behind.
- Facebook offers valuable data and insights that other platforms may not have. Facebook’s dedication to business support includes collecting and providing valuable, detailed data about engagement, sales, and more. Other platforms don’t necessarily guarantee those insights.
- Leaving could reduce visibility and brand awareness. Businesses today are practically expected to have a Facebook presence. With so many seeking out company Facebook pages and responding to PPC (pay-per-click) ads, not having one could limit visibility and awareness.
- There’s a risk of losing current engagement. If you’ve already built up a following on Facebook, it can be difficult to walk away from it. Even with good incentives for your Facebook “fans” to follow you to a new platform, there’s still a big risk of losing some of your existing audience.
- You may be overlooking tools that could make your experience easier. Some of the issues marketers face, such as time-management struggles, could potentially be helped by an optimization tool. Before you leave altogether, it’s a good idea to explore how a tool like AdBeacon might help you with advertising on Facebook.
AdBeacon Is Your Ad Optimization Solution
AdBeacon is scaling digital ad campaign ROAS, ROI, and performance faster and better than ever. With our detailed ad optimization tools, you’re able to keep your existing visibility and following on the platform while managing your campaigns from a separate, more tailored interface.
By using first-party data directly from your company, AdBeacon can provide the accurate, actionable numbers that Facebook can’t. You won’t have to worry about skewed data from fake profiles, and you’ll be able to maintain a positive brand image and solid ROI with informed, optimized marketing interactions.
Get in touch and book a free AdBeacon demo today to find out how we can help you stay on Facebook and remain competitive in a challenging marketplace.