I don’t care how targeted the advertising is. there are fundamental flaws with your database, and architecture, prohibiting real interaction and commerce. The way you have made “liking” a throwaway, offhanded activity… you have limited the accessibility and legitimacy of our ability to reach consumers and communicate with them.
In your compulsion to legitimize the ad model structure of your social business, you have marginalized the ability for people to meaningfully connect.
Return on Investment, IE – ability to track and prove that the consumer clicked from the ad through to a booking engine for a hotel or some form of purchase for our restaurant or spa. It’s hard enough to track without analytics at some properties… but the investment isn’t worth it.
People are still using Facebook in a personal manner, so they wear brands like fashion, for status. They aren’t interacting with the brand so much as showing it off as they might Gucci sunglasses or a Prada purse. People aren’t clicking through ads for commerce, and there isn’t the compulsion or awareness by normal Facebook users to create commerce, or interact with businesses as they would a review site, or open network. Your closed network based off random, extinct, geographical connections (school, etc) stifles ability to congregate and commune around brands or specific concepts. Your groups and pages don’t work properly, because people aren’t open to that sort of interaction as they might be on twitter or a different network.
Without users having the mindset of commerce, and doing business, there’s is little point to advertise on Facebook.
I am just an old school crotchedy operator. I like hard numbers. No… I never thought the print ads’ impressions meant anything either. But when I look at information, I want to see click throughs to $$$. I don’t give a crap about impressions. I don’t care if that’s your model… it doesn’t mean anything and everyone knows it. But you need a model, so we suffer along…. the print world has done this for years. Until you can offer a meaningful way to show dollar signs, then it doesn’t matter. I have put some booking engines inside our pages… I understand you have to be available where people congregate. But I just don’t know if it’s working… because people don’t think of business on facebook. They would go to tripadvisor to book our hotel after looking at our facebook page. That’s telling.