Good for paid marketing material; bad for general content distribution
November 15, 2018

Good for paid marketing material; bad for general content distribution

Brock Ross | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Facebook for Business

We mostly use FB for Business for marketing purposes--particularly, we use the Ads Manager. The users at our company consist mostly of 2-3 of us who frequently work on marketing projects. The Ads Manager lets us set up groups and subgroups of our customers, lookalike audiences, specific regions if we're doing a physical event, etc. The rest of the Business manager clearly holds a robust feature set, but we haven't used it as much.

Pros

  • Ads Manager gives huge control over targeting specific audiences, including audiences similar to your following, but who you aren't currently reaching. FB captures so, so much data about each of their users, and you're given the ability to leverage that data to sell your product.
  • A great set of options for ad types--video, carousel, slideshow, etc.--and user-friendly process for setting up each.
  • Good feedback on how your ads are doing--a relevance score, recommendations on using another ad type in certain applications, etc.

Cons

  • This isn't technically an issue with the software, but I have certainly experienced ethical qualms regarding user privacy. I don't love the thought of exploiting millions of users' personal information to sell a product.
  • Several little-used, deprecated, or de-facto deprecated ad formats show up in the previewer for a given ad--makes the tool feel outdated and unpolished.
  • There's a bit of a learning curve with the unintuitive navigation of Campaign > Ad Set > Ad. A better tutorial would help the user hit the ground running instead of clicking through each section trying to work out the differences of each.
  • FB for Business's ad manager has helped us sell a few tickets to our events that we may not have sold otherwise. This has amounted to something like $1k-2k in sales over the course of a year as a direct result of FB ads, with several hundred dollars spent on the ad budget.
  • On the whole, FB's changes to business pages over the years have been a net negative for our company. We used to rely on FB as our primary platform for distributing quality free content to our followers--now we have to pay through the nose to have our posts shown to even a fraction of our audience.
Our choice to use Facebook for Business over other ad services mostly boils down to the integrated user information FB provides. We simply couldn't have this level of intelligence about demographics and their behaviors if we chose any other ad platform. In this respect, FB for Business far outstrips any competition we've been able to find.
Facebook for Business is great for creating and distributing content that is strictly promotional. It's also great for keeping track of your followings' demographic information, as doing so on your own platform is time-consuming and leaves you open to User Privacy risks.

I don't like the way Facebook works for distributing non-promotional content. If we make an inspirational video that is soliciting no purchase whatsoever--it's simply good, free content that serves the viewer--Facebook wants our company to pay a price to get the video shown to more people. Compare this to, say, YouTube, where WE are paid for creating good content for our viewers. I strongly dislike the way Facebook for Business is built around paying FB to show your content to people, especially people who've already Liked your page and tacitly expressed "I like receiving content from this organization."

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