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while lots of marketers spend lots of money on Facebook today, relatively few find success. In August, Forrester surveyed 395 marketers and eBusiness executives at large companies across the US, Canada and the UK — and these executives told us that Facebook creates less business value than any other digital marketing opportunity.

ompany focuses too little on the thing marketers want most: driving genuine engagement between companies and their customers. Your sales materials tease marketers with the promise that you’ll help them create such connections. But in reality, you rarely do. Everyone who clicks the like button on a brand’s Facebook page volunteers to receive that brand’s messages — but on average, you only show each brand’s posts to 16% of its fans.

company isn’t good enough at the pure advertising business onto which you’ve shifted your focus. We estimate your site now delivers tens of billions of display ads every day. But fewer than 15% of those ads leverage your ever-growing cache of social data to target relevant audiences. And your site’s static-image ad units offer marketers less impact per impression than they could achieve with the ad units other sites offer.

I am surprised it has taken this long for Forrester to attack the performance of Facebook. It is something we have seen developing for years. The challenge is the space has evolved making it less and less relevant for brands in the eyes of the Consumer. The shift to mobile has made Facebook pages virtually obsolete. People very infrequently drift outside of their newsfeed on mobile devices.

One recent study of sweepstakes found that only 11.8% of participants shared the Facebook app with others. In the past that number was well over 50%. You add to that the way Facebook shares content (known as the Facebook algorithm or Edgerank) only 5-15% of their friends would even have the potential to see it in their newsfeed

Percolate first identifies which social topics matter to brands’ audiences, then finds matching assets in those brands’ databases. SocialFlow tracks how many of a brand’s social followers are active throughout the day, then automatically posts the brand’s content at the best possible moment. Brand Networks taps historical sales and weather databases to tell retailers which products will generate the most social interest, based on local forecasts. SimpleFeed helps brands’ affiliates automate content selection — dynamically publishing social posts that have worked for other affiliates in the past.

consumers are more trusting of content they can find on their own terms, rather than that which is pushed out to them by brands.

Looking solely at US respondents, only 15% trust social media marketing, 12% information about companies on mobile applications, 10% ads on websites, and 9% text messages from companies or brands.

Consumers display far more trust in what Forrester tabs “self-selected digital pull content.”

A great example of a company removing registration friction for a business audience is the online media division of The Business Journals. Since deploying Janrain Engage Social Login in June, they have reported a 12% increase in site registrations across 40 online properties.

Will social media play an important role for B2B marketers in the near future? We believe so and are seeing a growing interest from technology solution providers and other organizations that want to add a social element to their B2B website and marketing efforts. In Forrester’s report: Market Overview: 2011 Social Media Platforms For B2B Tech Marketing, they indicate: Today, there is increased demand for social media platforms from B2B tech marketers that are using social media tactics to engage with business technology buyers.

Ignite analysts reviewed 689 posts across 21 brand pages (all of significant size, across a variety of industries) and found that, in the week since December 1, organic reach and organic reach percentage have each declined by 44% on average, with some pages seeing declines as high as 88%. Only one page in the analysis had improved reach, which came in at 5.6%.

As reach declined, the raw number of engaged users plunged as well, falling on average by 35%. Some pages saw engaged users fall as much as 76%. Only one page in the data set had an increase in the number of engaged users, coming in at 0.7%.

To add salt to an open wound, current research from Forrester and Wildfire shows that engaged users are a brand’s best customers.  They are more likely to purchase, recommend and prefer brands when they are socially engaged with that brand.  With fewer engaged users (-35%), brands bottom line are further penalized by the recent changes.

The video ads, which the company says are still being tested to a limited number of users, will start playing automatically as users scroll through their news feed, the central real estate in Facebook's desktop and mobile platforms. They will initially play without sound; users can stop the ad by scrolling past it in the news feed.

In a November survey of 735 Facebook users by global marketing consultancy Analytic Partners, 83% of users said they would find video ads "intrusive" and would likely "ignore" them.

Subway was among the companies that placed ads containing video that users had to start manually. Mr. Pace of Subway said roughly 88 million people saw the ad and "millions" of people clicked on it. "It worked pretty darn well," he added.

They’ve abandoned the promise of helping companies genuinely connect with their customers. They’re not even very good at the model they’ve chosen, which is as a Web 1.0 ad seller.

Ads aren’t the focus on what marketers want from Facebook in the first place.

Facebook has completely gone back on what they originally promised marketers in 2007. It’s what they promote today. They sell this promise of connecting companies with their customers. Eighty-four percent of the time they don’t do that.