I have seen that. That mostly has to do with boost posts though. We only use custom tailored audiences for our ads and it works quite well. Albeit there's a lot of data scrubbing.

It really goes beyond that. Facebook wants to own your audience and that is fundamentally wrong.

Let's say I spend $100K advertising on FB to get people a my FB page or group. In order to now be able to reach them I have to constantly pay FB through boosts and further ads.

Why? Because they've installed a mechanism through which they limit the reach of every single post you make on your page. And, if a percentage of your likes are fake or non-responsive for various reasons (they liked the picture on your ad, couldn't care less about your content) it is very likely your posts will be to a great degree wasted on a useless audience.

In addition to this they have NOT installed a mechanism through which I can engage with my entire audience. I understand that people don't want their timeline spammed. At the same time, they liked the page. If they liked Tesla it is likely they want to hear from Tesla. Facebook provides no mechanism through which you can do this (message your entire audience) unless you pay them for every single point of contact on every single message/post.

This, to me, is fundamentally wrong. They don't own my customers. I do. A fan page or group owner should not have to pay FB over and over again to reach his or her audience. It's a scam.

In sharp contrast to this, if I spend the same $100K advertising on Google and get my customers/likes/fans to register on my site I can then build a real relationship with them over time. If they don't like what I am saying they can opt out of the emails they receive. If they do, they keep receiving them. And I don't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars every time I need to communicate with them.

A more concrete example is a product we tested on FB. It was aimed at medical professionals. With custom audiences you'd think you can reach a good number of your prospects. That isn't necessarily true. The heuristics they use can deliver anyone who, for example, likes pages with medical information. I am being simplistic. I think you get the point. Still, a good argument could be made that one could do worst outside FB. In terms of targeting a narrow audience this might mostly be true depending on the approach taken.

Reaching medical professionals on FB is expensive. Likes can easily cost you more than a dollar when all is said and done. And, generally speaking, there isn't a 1 to 1 relationship between ad spend and actions or page likes. So, you spend $100K to reach medical professionals and you might get 1,000 to 5,000 legitimate likes. In other words, you could actually spend a very real $20 to $100 per prospect. And then you have to spend money again every single time you need to reach them. We all know that a marketing message must be received multiple times before action is produced. You could very easily spend another $10 per prospect before you get a conversion. That's why I say this is a huge scam. If I spent $20 to $100 per effective member to a page or group, from that point forward they should be my members, prospects or customers, not Facebook's. And extorting money out of me in order to reach all of them with every post is just plain wrong.

The same scenario plays out far better if you avoid FB, use Google and other channels to reach your desired audience and bring people to your own environment for engagement. We've tested this with various audiences and also had plenty of prior experience before advertising on FB. We can consistently produce better results out of direct engagement with an email list as small as 200 people than by spending almost any amount of money on FB.

This is why I don't understand when I see TV ads where companies are subverting their brands to FB by telling people to go to their FB page rather than their own landing pages. They spend millions of dollars creating and airing these ads and then they have to go back and shovel more money at FB to reach the very people they spent so much money to target. That's just insane. More people doesn't mean better results.

In the end I think it is about a basic business formula: Is there a more cost-effective and higher-converting approach to reaching customers and building relationships with them than using FB ads? At the moment my answer to that question is: Yes. Absolutely. I could be wrong but my experiences so far tell me otherwise.