Despite all media believing Facebook is some magical tool that helps small businesses market themselves, my experience with using it for Modmarket has been filled with disappointment.

Some big issues:


You cannot run contests without using third party apps. This is ridiculous. If I want to give away a free meal to someone who comments on our page I should be able to do so without having to pay a third party service that has a crappy product (I am talking about you WildFire)

You cannot have a master page for a business with multiple locations. Did Facebook not realize that companies like restaurants might want a master page and sub pages so they can easily manage social media across all their locations?

The whole checkin program they implemented was a complete fail and has resulted in a bunch of random pages for Modmarket existing that we have no control over.

Their advertising costs about the same per click as google adwords and in our experience is much less effective.

This is all such a shame because with some small tweaks, it could be an amazingly useful platform for a company like Modmarket. Maybe once they go public this year they will get their act together.

Tags: Facebook fail, Facebook for small business, Facebook restaurant pages, gluten free boulder