If you’ve never had reason to buy advertising on Facebook, let me tell you that it works. You can micro-target your ad to reach the narrowest of demographics. Do you want to appeal only to Moms in their 30s with two children who belong to Pinterest and eat only organic arugula? Done. Or you can blanket the whole FB population. You control it and you set the budget. You pay by the click. It’s cheap and it’s effective.Â
A word of caution. If you start to build a Facebook ad and then change your mind, you may as well close your account, change your name and move to another country. Oh, what am I saying? They’ll probably find you anyway.
I ran a test ad for Lisa’s Pieces for the total sum of $3 US and then started to create – and abandoned – a second, bigger ad. Facebook doesn’t like that. Facebook wants you to finish what you started! It’s worse than leaving an item in your shopping cart with Amazon. They’ll only send you one email to ask if you still want that thing. Facebook is relentless. Its automatic settings will send you a direct message which you can only answer by choosing one of three responses.
Add to that the fact that someone posting on behalf of CJBK also abandoned a boosted post, basically a mini-ad. So every time an administrator logged on, we were pressured. I decided to see what it would do if I didn’t choose the preselected responses and hit them with some classic Monty Python lines.
I have dealt with this b.s. every time I’ve logged into Facebook from a different computer. I finally chose the preselected response, “It was a mistake”, but that didn’t get them off my back. Follow-up is a good idea but this is too much. In fact, it’s a turn-off.
Lesson #1: Facebook will get results for just pennies. Lesson #2: Make absolutely sure you want to follow through or they will haunt you forever more. Well played, Zuckerberg. Well played.
Facebook got into trouble from our Federal Privacy Office for behavior like this in the past, and if it was me, they’d be experiencing a second go round.