Everyone is talking about social media sites as the hottest new place to advertise your business. The hype machine has been in motion about facebook, twitter, and linkedin for a while now. Having a social media presences is important for a company. Many people spend a lot of their time on social media sites and many others frequently use them as a resource. A company active on social media will have better relationships with their clients and will keep their products in front of the potential customer base, but what about paid advertisements on these sites? Are they worth the money? In our experience, the answer has been absolutely not.

We have tested paid advertisements on both Facebook and LinkedIn and we have been wholly unimpressed with the results. Clicks from Facebook seem to be very low quality and often accidental. The people who use facebook the most don’t seem to be clicking on ads when they are actually interested, at least by the results we saw, most clicks seemed to be accidental, coming from people who were playing games like Farmville. This is not a good target market for us, or most businesses for that matter. Bounce rates were sky high. As for LinkedIn, we have actual numbers from our advertising venture with them. Here they are: Visits: 318 Page Visits: 3.8200 Average length of Visit :04:01 New Visits 77.36% BOUNCE RATE 68.24%. Our benchmark Bounce rate is 26.82%. Needless to say we were not happy with the bounce rates we received from the site and it led us to believe that the clicks from LinkedIn were not of very high quality either.

While we are convinced that social media is a great tool and that using it is a necessity for any modern company, we have our doubts about paying for advertising on these sites. Our suggestions is to continue to use the free portions of these sites to support and promote your business and spend your advertising budget elsewhere.

Robert Hicks

President