Social media has become critically important for business organizations because it is a novel way to engage the users and get them know a certain brand or business well enough. Facebook, being the king of digital social media, is considered vital for business advertising and marketing. Now, it seems that General Motors spent a huge budget on its Facebook presence but couldn’t make much out of it.
In total, GM paid Facebook a total of $10 million while spending another $30 million on the maintenance of its Facebook pages and content to go with them. However, after some 16 months, this isn’t working for GM and the company has decided to stop paying Facebook, saying that the ads on Facebook simply didn’t work for it.
Interestingly, this is happening just days before we are expecting Facebook to go public. Will it hurt Facebook in turns of share price? Probably not. But it is bad publicity, for sure. However, some analysts have speculated that GM itself wasn’t able to spend the money well enough. Rather it ran a ‘lousy campaign’ which naturally failed.
From what it seems in the light of information divulged by an inside source, GM’s primary focus was creating general content, without considering the fact that content on a social network needs to be far more engaging and enticing for the users.
Moreover, if some content is excellent on Facebook but it lacks the ability to network with other friends, it is useless because it won’t go viral and thus, can’t be a part of a successful marketing campaign. GM, however, made all these mistakes. The content, specifically, was least engaging on GM’s Facebook pages.
The inevitable result was that even with app the paid ads, the company couldn’t get a great response because users didn’t seem to be interested in its content. Here’s what the former social media agency, Big Fuel, which was working for GM, had to say, ” GM never seemed persuaded of the value of social media in general and Facebook likes in particular. In a sales-driven culture, it is very hard to wrap your head around putting money in places where you don’t see immediate results in an uptick in sales.”
Source: WSJ
Courtesy: CNET
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