Does Facebook Hate You?

Here’s a question I get from members frequently… often enough, in fact, that I want to tackle this topic today to set the matter straight.

“I’m certain that Facebook hates me. Costs are going up on the platform, and I’m not getting the conversions I’ve gotten in the past (3 months to a year ago). Now with the pandemic it’s harder than ever to manage inventory and fulfillment. How am I supposed to stay in business?”

The question reminds me of the old missive, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

Facebook has long had its place in business promotion. They keep changing the rules, and it’s getting pricey, but it’s got its place in the mix. (For the record, there are multiple reasons for rising costs across the platform and also within an individual account — which we’ll talk about another time).

For those who started out feeding their retail businesses with paid traffic via Facebook, there was a time in history when we thought more about keywords (think “Google”) than interests (a la Facebook).

But in general, many ecommerce stores don’t worry so much about keywords and seo. At least not those who focus on growth using paid traffic from Facebook.

This is a mistake though. 

Keyword research offers insight into our readers and visitors. 

It happens as search intent at the search engines (yes — off of Facebook).

Search is about what we look for.

More powerfully, however, search intent is the outcome we want as the result of the doing the search in the first place.

A bunch of years ago some search fields started adding autosuggest to help with search. It’s a fantastic tool. To a user, autosuggest says to me, “Hey, here are a few other possible word phrases that might complete what you’re typing now, based on what other people have searched.”

Statistically they’re right — at scale, there is a good chance that when I start typing in “David” at Google, I’m looking for David Attenborough. And there he is, showing up in autosuggest.

That’s good UX… but it’s also good for business.

Google, and Amazon, and everyone else using autosuggest are giving us the back end of what’s going on in your potential visitors’ minds, based on what large numbers of other people have already searched for.

When you reverse engineer autosuggest you now have a powerful research tool that gives you keywords for your business.

It’s low-tech. There are no metrics to go along with it.

But my search for air filter gives me these autosuggest results:

… and now I have website content ideas, I have product growth ideas, I have insight into my market, and if I am paying attention to SEO factors on my store, I could win some traffic using these additional words or phrases properly.

If my store sells air filters, I see that I can specify air filters for ac… I can clarify that we deliver... I can offer air filters for cars… and whoever Merv is, he gets some love, too. 

Actually, this “merv rating" is an enlightening item because this shows me that there is a market segment that is sophisticated enough to use technical jargon — and I can attract these folks with jargon in product descriptions, copy-on-page, special reports, ad copy, and in whatever else.

All of these wonderful words are how search engines know what’s on your site. Sure, Facebook can identify some features within video. But at the end of the day, when you want to be found with paid or free traffic, it’s going to be the words in various ways (more than I’ve talked about here) that get people to you.

Cue the music. That’s my prompt to segue into talking about the free mastermind Traffic Handler group.

It used to be a very pricey program. But I made a bunch of changes. Now part of the program, the Facebook group that went with the program, is open to all.

I like to joke that Facebook ads are the gateway drug to a real marketing addiction. 

Want to get hooked on some really good marketing? Come find out what the buzz is about. We’re growing millionaires.