Forrester to Facebook: you're SHALLOW and a BAD FRIEND

Also a BIG DATA DUNCE who tells fat fibs to ad-slingers … bitch

Analyst house Forrester has unloaded on Facebook, accusing it of doing a terrible job for ad-slingers.

Forrester veep and principal analyst Nate Elliot has penned a blog post, styled as an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg that opens with the blunt assertion “Facebook is failing marketers.”

The letter goes on to back up that statement with research suggesting marketers feel “Facebook creates less business value than any other digital marketing opportunity.”

Next comes a critique of Facebook's ability to drive “genuine engagement between companies and their customers.” The site doesn't, Elliot says, not least because post from brands users have been foolish enough to Like don't end up in front of their eyeballs very often.

Elliot's next criticism may sting even more, as it wounds Facebook's hacker pride by offering the opinion that “fewer than 15% of … ads leverage your ever-growing cache of social data to target relevant audiences.”

In other words, you're bad at big data. Elliot thinks the site is also bad at being nice to marketers, especially on the measurement front. Google analytics, by contrast, offers a deluge of data.

The post also notes that Facebook has “the largest audience in media history” and “you know a remarkable amount about each of your users”, then concludes that there's time to turn things around and make ad-slingers happy again.

Whether that's the same as making users happy is anyone's guess. Reg reader reaction to reports The Social Network^TM will introduce cursor-tracking suggests Facebook members are tuning out from Facebook's current advertising offerings. ®