2022 was a big year for the world of social media because Elon Musk acquired Twitter and Facebook finally showed they have a chip in the armor.
The positive
You as a small/medium size business owner can only benefit from healthy competition in the world of ad networks: Social networks, Search engines, big media websites etc. With the move to buy Twitter in late 2022 Elon Musk became the biggest market maker in the marketing world ever. The new advertising features which Twitter released about one month after the acquisition honestly opened the flood gates to that network. Twitter historically has always had a very active and engaged user base, the best educated, the most influential, probably the best memes and a ton of interesting smart people which are there to engage with the world. The issue was that it wasn’t working well in terms of selling products and services.
I always emphasize how important is high quality data from digital marketing and making business as a whole. Elon’s first move was to enroll a brand new, improved, actually useful Twitter pixel which can track many conversions and metrics across devices and a good amount of time. This made me realize he had serious intentions to turn this social network 180 degrees. The new and improved Twitter pixel allows for performance oriented campaign types and ads
The collection ad which is also available on FB allows the advertiser to add video, image and a set of products via a product feed or manually with price, headline, image and a link to your website where people can buy. It is the prime choice for marketers which use DPA ( dynamic product ads, used for Dynamic remarketing and retargeting ). The safest choice for testing a new ad network, smart move Musk.
Add to the mix some unique ad features like in ad polls, branded links, buttons and a bunch of other stuff and the days of purely Brand driven advertising on Twitter are gone.
I will go as far as this: Twitter is the new Facebook, it is growing like crazy, the CPA ( cost per acquisition ) makes sense because the CPM is still cheap enough to allow small businesses to have a good profit after the cost of advertising.
The negative
Every single advertiser on Facebook and Instagram is playing a deadline game. It is only a matter of time before two things happen.
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- Enough people who are willing to be your customers leave Facebook and Instagram for another network like Twitter or become so infrequent in their use of them that their value to any business is below the value which that business has to pay to reach them on average.
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- Worsening results for businesses will drive up the competition: when the stakes are small the competition becomes fierce! The higher the avg. CPM ( cost per 1000 impressions ) goes, the bitter the bidding.
Facing their demise the managers and the founder of Facebook decided the best move it was become a VR company on steroids ( paid news articles on the Internet ). Why would somebody prefer to spend their time everyday with a screen attached to their head and pretend they are actually in a different place is beyond me and believe me I am open minded and pro innovation 100%! When I try to compare this move I can’t help myself but to think about some comedy analogies. This is honestly sad.
It is sad not for Facebook as a company but for its customers, the advertisers who will keep getting Destroyed more and more over time until they go under or finally make the move to Twitter and other channels in search of clients.
The Upcoming “Meta” crisis
When there is a crisis there are two types of people: the victims and those who use it as an opportunity.
The first group of people would stick to paying crazy high CPM’s to FB with declining revenue coming from advertising on it and will blame everybody but their reluctance to move to a budget to a different social network. For them this is an issue which can be resolved inside the “box”. It is all about settings, messages, designs, targeting ect. This can Always help you in the short term but if the ship is sinking getting in a nice suite won’t ultimately help you get more clients on it.
You are probably asking how did all that started?
The first reason is Facebook ( Zuckerberg ) enjoyed a monopoly in the Social media business because they were able to do the platform right before anybody else. This made them unwilling to really innovate after one point and the things which they innovated were not enough to outweigh the negative aspects for their platforms. People over time lost interest, deleted their account and simply left for another website. We are seeing this speed up especially during the Pandemic in 2020. Lack of innovation = degradation.
Second is Apple’s decision in 2021 to attack Facebook at the core of its business: data collection. By allowing Apple users to opt-out of tracking completely while using Facebook/Insta was such a big hit to them that there is now way to go around it without pumping the results ( revenue ) in order to prevent mass exodus of advertisers. This is their big problem and secret, they have been cheating for years, world wide.
The third reason is not the “genius” move from Zuck who in my opinion is detached from reality in a way few people have achieved. It is Elon Musk and Twitter, now people both as users and clients have an alternative to the core platform of Zuck. Before that they could use Snapchat, Tiktok ect. but those platforms resemble Instagram. Facebook had no alternative, for more than 10 years and this is why Zuck lost the plot.
Opportunity on the horizon
It is hard to think from first principles but if one platform is growing like crazy and is cheaper and another is dying and the cost to advertise is going through the roof I find it convincing to give the new “kid” a nice try with my advertising money. If you are or become one of the early “adopters” of Twitter in terms of advertising you can benefit disproportionately compared to businesses who join it later.
It is not all about advertising of course, making this your primary platform and uploading engaging content on Twitter is mandatory to build the business there. No problem in maintaining Facebook while you are growing your new page, so don’t think of this as losing some online assets. This looks like more work and that is true, making more money comes with more work. The good thing about that is that you can hire people to help you with the money you are making. Stagnating and shrinking doesn’t allow for that.
Allocating your capital well, making good decisions is what business is all about in order to make more profit YoY. With the path on which Facebook is moving, doing that while investing a lot of time and money on their network becomes more difficult YoY. Make your decisions wisely, the Rewards are Real.
