The 5 Greatest Challenges Facing Facebook Marketing

Terry Tateossian November 19, 2021

Facebook, the world’s most popular and widely used social media channel, started as a platform to bring people closer together and form positive relationships. As brands are always looking for ways to reach wider audiences, it was a matter of time before Facebook emerged as one of the most widely used mediums for connecting with customers. Today, millions of businesses engage with people and advertise on Facebook to micro-target audiences.

With over 2.9 billion active monthly users, on-platform advertising and organic marketing offer ? huge potential but the platform still has its challenges. Specifically, many brands face five key challenges: targeting the right audience, keeping Facebook groups active, sharing engaging videos, moderating comments, and retargeting interested users.

Facebook Challenge #1 – Targeting the Right Audience

To run a successful social media marketing and advertising campaign, marketers need to target users who would be interested in the service or product they are selling. All too often, brands end up targeting the wrong audience because their parameters are too broad and the targeting isn’t specific enough.

There are different ways to target when creating a Facebook campaign, including lookalike, custom, and core audiences. A lookalike audience is a group of users who share the interests or characteristics of existing customers or contacts. With custom audiences, brands can reach users who already engaged with their business, whether instore or online. Core audiences are pulled from demographic data such as gender, age, geography, lifestyle, interests, and purchase-based demographics.

Facebook Challenge #2 – Keeping Facebook Groups Active

Having a Facebook group allows businesses to build a close-knit community of like-minded people. This is a place where members get to engage with others frequently, share information, learn from one another, and rally around a common cause or purpose. And while Facebook groups are great for driving engagement, the challenge is to keep the group active. Doing so could take a lot of effort and time but the results are worth the effort.

One way to go about this is to encourage members to share their experiences or suggestions about how to improve the group. Engaging members with short-term challenges or polls and hosting scheduled events also give users a reason to tune in.

Facebook Challenge #3 – Sharing Engaging Videos

Engaging videos grab people’s attention, evoke emotions, inspire action, and ultimately influence buying decisions. Videos reach further than other forms of content as visual content is more desirable than other formats. According to the Wyzowl Video Marketing Statistics 2021 survey, 69 percent of consumers prefer to watch a video compared to 18 percent who’d rather read a post, website, or article.

While there is a wide choice of formats, including educational, customer, product, and explainer videos, demos, and vlogs, making a video is a major challenge for many businesses due to factors such as expertise and cost. Businesses would have to hire professionals which can cost a lot of money. Instead, using screen recording and video editing programs to make videos can cut back on costs.

Facebook Challenge #4 – Moderating Comments

It is not uncommon for businesses to fall victim to trolls and other groups that send unwanted messages, leave inappropriate comments, and use offensive, derogatory, or discriminative language.

One way to solve this issue is to set guidelines, post a FAQ section, and implement an escalation process to deal with users who want to engage in battle. Block trolls who breach Facebook’s Community Standards and hide any inappropriate conversations and comments. Another approach is to ban specific keywords such as spam, crook, thief, liar, and scam. Add offensive labels and words that are inherently offensive and all such comments will get automatically hidden.

It is important to address negative feedback as it can be a sign of disengagement or dissatisfaction that a customer feels about a specific product or service. Yet, to properly address feedback, whether positive or negative, we need to understand it. When we hear or read something new, it pays to ask others whether they share the same opinion and why. Even feedback by complete strangers can be helpful, with marketers using the insight to address the issue at hand.

Facebook Challenge #5 – Retargeting Interested Users

Retargeting campaigns enable brands to advertise to customers who previously visited their Facebook page, e-shop, or website and left without buying. Retargeting or remarketing can be an effective strategy to draw customers back when done right. There are some things that can drive interested customers away, however, like touching upon sensitive topics, repeating the same message over and again, failing to segment customers, and targeting visitors who have already checked out.

Segmentation is key to Facebook advertising, and remarketing is no exception. Segmenting customers by estimated lifetime value, cart vs. browse abandonment or time on site enables marketers to focus on retargeting the best audiences possible.

Targeting users who already checked out is a common social media marketing mistake. Such customers are unlikely to take any action and can safely be excluded from all retargeting campaigns. Also, getting the same ads is super annoying and frustrating for customers. Instead, it is better to show ads that feature promotion extensions, limited-time sales, testimonials, or other products.

Finally, sensitive and controversial topics should be avoided when launching a marketing campaign. In fact, Facebook recently announced it will no longer allow targeting that keys on race and ethnicity, political affiliation, sexual orientation, religion, health, and other sensitive topics (Sky News).

Summing Up

From targeting the wrong audience to retargeting customers who already purchased, there is no shortage of issues to focus on when crafting a marketing strategy. Creating an effective strategy is not always easy but there are workarounds and solutions. Most importantly, marketers need to revisit and change their approach and find actionable solutions to connect with a relevant audience and grow their business.

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