Facebook | Mulley Communications

Be Like Apple

Be like Apple.

560 words

Ignore the hype men. Sometimes it’s not worth being first.

Apple wasn’t first with the smartphone or touchscreen phones or smart watches or VR glasses or cars. They did a huge amount of research and patents first and watched how the market reacted to something. They worked on many projects and did testing and then dropped some of them. They didn’t release something to the market just because they spent so much on it. They were happy to just learn and move on. Sunk costs and all that. Sometimes Apple was too early and sometimes they decided it would never work. Apple let others be first, noted their flaws and where they could do better and then launched. Some of the original iPhone team were actually in another company building an iPhone nearly 20 years before Apple but the tech wasn’t ready. So be like Apple when it comes to the shiny.

I see all these charlatans breaking their necks being web 2.0 consultants, being Periscope experts, being Facebook Live gurus, being TikTok experts, being Clubhouse consultants (remember Clubhouse?) and now being NFT or Metaverse or something that smells of horseshit. People who are the first to grab on to the next big hype cycle and drop everything else, why do they do that? For some they run to this because in an established and stable system, you can spot they’re full of shit so they’re running away more than running to something. Don’t be fooled by these people telling you to drop your website or that you need an app or to get into VR or the Metaverse. When it fails they’ll have an excuse like being too early or that you weren’t full invested. Wait for someone like Apple to open the door and turn on the lights.

The big big social media space in 2021 was TikTok. It’s gigantic and will get bigger. It’s also a lot of work to create something and then get traction. Consider running ads on it instead. The big issue with TikTok is you can go from zero to 1000s to 10,000s to a million followers faster than any other place online ever but you will go out of fashion just as quickly. The birth, stardom, and death cycle is hyper-accelerated. The place is full of one hit wonders. If you look at the YouTube superstars of the past while, those stars used to get 10m views on a video and now some of them are barely getting 5000 views. They made their money on Youtube ads and you got more money per view if you had big numbers. They’re earning nothing now.

Oculus from Facebook did very well this Christmas but this is still a small-fry piece of tech that’s not got a lot of games or developers. While it is good to work on apps for Occulus in order that you have the IP to port to Apple, once Apple comes along it’s probably game over for other headset makers. Remember Nokia? Do you want to pour money into a Nokia app? Consider that developers that made apps for Apple devices have made $230 billion since the app store opened in 2011. That’s the company you want to hitch your wagon to.

Hold fast.
As per this clip from Master and Commander. Hold fast. Be like Apple.

Are Facebook Ads worth it for SMEs? Yes

Are Facebook ads, worth it for an SME/small business?

Yeah, I probably think, for an SME, where you just don’t have enough time to be constantly updating Facebook (and you do have to constantly update Facebook to keep in people’s feeds) then advertising is actually a better way to use your time and use your resources.

Updates or ads – the costs

Work it out. How much do you pay yourself or s staff member an hour, how may hours a week or a month are then tending to Facebook just to keep people seeing you are there.You could have an ad campaign that maybe just cost 40 or 50 euros and you can have that run over a week or two. When you run that campaign, you’re going to (see my other post on Facebook advertising) you want to run a campaign, you can set it to go off and we go back to the main parts of your business, so you don’t have to worry about what content to put up today, or tomorrow, how to create engaging posts, or, or anything like that.

Type of Facebook ads

You choose your audience, put up some content that you think the audience will be interested in, could be sales updates, it could be a video showing off a product could be a discount or anything like that can be just awareness, it could be a new business and a new town and you decide that the best way of getting interest is to run a Facebook ad, you can run that ad, you can run it to a certain age group, you can actually target any neighborhood, say in Cork or suburban Dublin, or just a whole county like Leitrim. You can run that ad, and it just goes out to those people. As the ad is running, you will actually see pretty much live stats on how many people have seen it so far, you can actually see what the device is whether it’s Android, whether it’s apple, whether it’s a desktop or a laptop. All that information is there for you, and you can see how many people clicked on that ad, or if you can send people to the website, or you can have the ad running so that you just get messages on Facebook or Instagram.

Facebook ads might be complicated to start with

The only thing that might actually persuade you not to run ads is the fact that setting up an ad on Facebook is slightly complex. You have to set up a campaign, and you have to put details in that, then you have to create an ad set and in that ad set you have to create an ad. So after the first couple of times you start to get used to Facebook advertising. The system is well designed pretty well. If you run an ad campaign before you can actually go into the ad system, click on that campaign, basically say duplicate that. So run it again but change the dates and change the budget.

Go for it

So for a small business with limited time, a limited amount of staff, you don’t have a full time marketer or you’re the marketer. In an SME you’re the manager you’re the accountant and everything else, then I think Facebook ads might actually work. So I advise a lot of clients to set up a Facebook page, and maybe do a bit on it to keep it ticking over, but actually to run some advertising and time them to go out. You don’t have to worry about that day’s updates and it’s just running there in the background. And hopefully you’ll get a return out of that. And I guess the beauty of all of these digital kind of ads in our systems, is you can measure it, to see, is it working or not and if it doesn’t work, you can just stop it or amended, make some changes and set it off again.

Try, fail, fail better, win!

With a newspaper ad that you commission and it runs once in a newspaper. For some say page ads in traditional Irish media you could be paying €3000 for an ad or €4000 or €10,000 for a full page ad. Once you committed to the ad, you can’t change it, if there’s a mistake or an incorrect website address, tough. With digital, you can change that straightaway. With digital you can make changes, measure what worked, make more changes and keep doing that until you get a very well tested ad.

Ads tested with real people and iterated

From that, then you have a data set, or in a way you have a crib sheet or a document or a template for future ads. So back to the question, I would actually suggest that they spend more time on ads than updates. Then maybe spend time on their website as you can get constant returns from ranking on Google.

Is Facebook going to end up buying Clubhouse?

Probably.

A16Z are investors in Clubhouse. Clubhouse gets valued at $100M. The PR and hype cycle begins. A16Z are powerhouses at coverage. Then Clubhouse gets valued at $1 billion.

A16Z invested in Qik. Marc Andreessen was on the board of Skype. Skype buys Qik. This is a common enough thing it seems.

Marc Andreessen is on the board of Facebook too. Zuckerberg comes on to Clubhouse for a chat.

Elon Musk big ups Clubhouse and joins a chat. Millions of more users join.

Then he gets Kanye involved.

Just agree to do Clubhouse with @kanyewest

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 10, 2021

The more users Clubhouse has, the more it can be sold for. It’s at the top of hype lists now. The value will go up as more celebs and tech bros join and the general population flows in. It’s standard for social networks to do that celeb catnip trick. Other tech firms know the Facebook connection too so that might spur them to buy it at an inflated price to block Facebook. This will be fun.

Now put your café and restaurant menus on Facebook

Facebook made a nice small change for restaurant and café Pages. Now you can now upload your menus once they’re less than 1Mb in size. These can easily be viewed on desktop or mobile.

On your Page go into Settings > Page Info and there should be a Menu option available. Click on that and upload your Menu.

This is what it looks like on a mobile:

Hat tip to someone on Twitter for this, sorry forgot who.

Tweetrank: Is Twitter going to do their own Edgerank, charge to push all your Tweets?

Twitter are apparently going to rank our Tweets on quality. None, Low, Medium and eventually High. High maybe being like the “Top Tweets” you see in searches. This will allow the “Best” tweets to be seen. The worry for me is that will also allow other tweets to be hidden away. This is a bit like Facebook’s Edgerank where you don’t see all the updates from your connections but will see more updates from friends or brands you interact with more. Twitter too adopting the filter bubble. With 150k or so people on Twitter in Ireland daily and they allegedly sending out a 1 Million tweets in total, filtering may need to happen.

I’m not the only one that was wondering about “Tweetrank“. Facebook allows you to promote posts on your personal Profile on your business Page to ensure everyone sees your update. So will Twitter start doing the same? €50 and a guarantee your own followers see that Tweet of yours.

But with Edgerank doing what it does, you can pay to promote an update so everyone sees it. Is this what Twitter will do too? Pay to ensure everyone that’s connected to you sees your tweet? One of the reasons I like Twitter is that I can dictate the filtering, Facebook doesn’t give me that choice. Now if Twitter allowed people to choose No filter, medium filter, high filter, that would be a great compromise that still makes them money.

Update: August 18th 2013
Twitter is now doing surveys about prioritising your Tweets. It does feel like they are going to do some kind of filtering as the noise on the network goes up.

Things to read on a Saturday – August 6th 2011

Good blog post from the PSNI, not backing away from social media despite people trying to target the police on Facebook and elsewhere.

Journalists and engaging in social media.

Sentiment Analysis is shite.

In the same breath, 11 ways to measure the value of social media.

Email marketing tips. Useful enough.

Social Media Art.

www.Facebook.ie

Ever used the Google Keyword Tool to see what people are Googling for each month? It’s fantastic for a database of intentions. This is what people search for, can you create a website or even a business around it?

I was wondering do people Google for Facebook.ie and Twitter.ie instead of the proper .com addresses and it seems yes, quite a lot of people do for Facebook.ie at least. Maybe there should be a redirect from Facebook.ie?

The below searches seem common enough:
www.Facebook.ie
ww.facebook.ie
Facebook.ie login

Facebook Places Ireland finally launches

Facebook Places for Ireland finally launched today. Some of the nerdier types have been waiting for ages to get to play with this. (Some even nerdier ones did all kind of hacks with networks toe be able to check in).

What does it mean for an individual?

More stalkeridge! You can now see where you friends are and with whom, if they wish to share this information. You can tell your friends where you are now, show them pictures from that location etc. As Facebook Places matures you will be able to avail of deals in locations near you or go to the locations based on offers.

What does it mean for a business?

If you claim your Place/location you can merge it with an existing Business Page. When someone checks in, their friends see this, might click on through and see your business details. If people are frequenting your business, why not give them the option of telling their friends? The average Irish person has 160 friends on Facebook. That’s the potential audience every time someone checks in to your location on Facebook. The longterm goal with this is Facebook Deals. Check in, get 20% off, win prizes and so on. Rewards for being loyal.

Right now: As a business, get your physical location created or claim it and enable people to check in. Get some Facebook Stickers made too to encourage people to check in!

Here are some of the frequently asked questions on Facebook Places.

The above pic is me outside Facebook HQ in Dublin with a giant Places icon. Courtesy of Made In Hollywood Props.