The Fish Are There. But Where? — The Fish Test: Facebook

Facebook seemed an obvious place to investigate.

There are groups devoted to almost every imaginable subject, including affiliate marketing, online business, side hustles and making money online.

Some of these communities contain thousands of members.

On the surface, that looked promising. If large numbers of people had gathered around the subjects I was investigating, perhaps Facebook would make it relatively easy to find potential customers.

But the Fish Test asks a more specific question.

Were these groups full of people looking for help, or full of people trying to sell help to one another?

Finding relevant Facebook groups wasn't difficult.

There were large communities built around affiliate marketing, online business and making money online.

And there were genuine questions.

People were asking for advice, discussing problems and trying to understand what they should do next.

So unlike my initial experience on X, there was evidence that some of the fish were there.

But there was another problem.

There was also an enormous amount of promotion.

Posts promoting opportunities, systems, courses and services appeared alongside genuine questions.

People were looking for customers while other people were looking for answers.

In terms of the Fish Test, Facebook therefore presented a slightly different problem from X.

There appeared to be plenty of fish — but there were plenty of fishermen competing for their attention as well.

A large group membership number didn't tell me how many members were genuinely active, how many were potential customers, or how many were simply there to promote something themselves.

Once again, audience size and useful audience were not necessarily the same thing.

The investigation became more useful when I stopped concentrating simply on group size and started looking more closely at recent posts and individual conversations.

That made it easier to distinguish genuine questions from the surrounding promotional activity.

It also reinforced something that was beginning to emerge from the other Fish Tests.
The useful information wasn't necessarily found by asking:

“Where is the biggest audience?”

A better question was:

“Where are people actually talking about the problem I am interested in?”

Facebook provided evidence that relevant people are there.

But simply joining large groups and publishing promotional posts would put me alongside all the other people competing for attention.

The existence of a large audience does not automatically create an opportunity to reach it.

If Facebook is going to be useful to this experiment, the opportunity is more likely to come from identifying genuine conversations and contributing something relevant to them.

That means looking beyond membership numbers and measuring what actually happens.

Facebook hasn't failed the Fish Test.

I found both relevant people and genuine questions.

The next question is whether useful participation in those conversations can attract attention and eventually produce visits to my website.

I haven't established that yet.

For now, my Facebook finding is:

The fish are there — but so are a great many fishermen.

The challenge is to become useful rather than simply adding to the promotional noise.
The experiment continues.