Our recent report on why Facebook is failing marketers has caused quite a bit of conversation — with some supporting our findings and others disputing them — and we think that’s healthy. We fully stand behind our data and our conclusions, and we welcome the chance to further discuss what’s working and what’s not working in social media. Conversations like these can only push the industry forward and help all social marketers and sites become more successful.

In particular, we wanted to address a few common questions people are asking about our research:

  1. Facebook’s score didn’t look that low. Are they really failing marketers? Facebook offers marketers access to the largest audience in media history and it knows a remarkable amount about each of its users and their affinities. By all rights, Facebook should be driving significantly more value for marketers than other sites and channels — but according to our survey, they’re not. Forrester’s Data Center of Excellence has looked at this data many different times, through many different lenses, and every view of the data supports this conclusion.
  2. Who exactly are these 395 marketers and eBusiness executives you surveyed? Put simply, they’re the buyers Facebook cares most about. They all work at the manager level or higher in interactive marketing or ecommerce roles at companies with more than 500 employees and more than $500 million in annual revenue. They all have knowledge of their company’s marketing budgets, and they all reported that their companies spend at least $500,000 per year on digital marketing or on eCommerce technologies and services.
  3. Why did you only ask about marketers’ “satisfaction” with Facebook, not actual ROI? Because not every marketer uses the same definition of ROI. Some Facebook marketers tell us they’re trying to build greater brand awareness or preference; others tell us they’re trying to drive direct leads and sales; and still others say their goal is to increase customer satisfaction and reduce churn. With marketers targeting such a broad range of objectives, asking them about their satisfaction with the business value Facebook provided was the best way to represent all their responses on a single scale.