I started promoting my Christmas models in various 3D-printing Facebook groups, but they bring very few visitors. Why?
What I’m doing:
A short description, asking for support, and placing the link in the comments.
I attach a picture.
I share the post in a maximum of 3–5 groups per day, 1–2 times a week.
There were cases where several of my models brought zero downloads. Meanwhile, another model that I haven’t promoted at all reached 200–300 downloads in just a few days.
What am I doing wrong? How can I reach more people? How can I reach Chinese users?
I think the issue is that you’re advertising for models in a area where it’s already overly saturated. Go search for “Christmas corner decoration” and you’ll scroll for days. So people tend to become desensitized to models like this even if they are done well.
While I’m no expert on advertising, I do know quite a bit about the algorithms used by Facebook, Reddit and other sites.
We have now reached a point where the tag ‘Christmas’ is posted hundreds of thousands of times per second. We’re not even talking in terms of minutes anymore. Your posts are mercilessly sorted out by the algorithm.
This is how it works: Your post will only be visible to a few users, and if they don’t interact with it, the algorithm will mark it as uninteresting. The term “Christmas” is currently a bit of a double-edged sword. Unless you have something truly unique that users will immediately click on, it’s best to avoid using it.
Algorithms also notice when you frequently post things that no one is interested in. It thinks: ‘Nah, he’s just spamming his junk!’ Whether or not that’s true, you won’t even notice. In the long run, this actually hurts you.
Now is actually the perfect time to publish something completely unrelated to Christmas. Simply by entering ‘Christmas Pikachu’ into a search engine, I found thousands of models. Competing with all of them would be almost impossible.
And by the way, if you post this on Facebook, at least the pictures you showed here in the thread are completely unsuitable. They’re too boring. They have to catch the eye immediately - within milliseconds. The same applies to Reddit and other sites. If you want to compete in this arena, you’ll need to do much better than this, in terms of image quality and image composition.
I’ve personally thrown in the towel when it comes to this, not in terms of 3D printing, but when it comes to promoting other products during the Christmas season or black friday. It’s more stressful than it’s worth. I’d rather have good figures consistently throughout the year. People are simply bored and are even turning away, which is more damaging to business.
“Thank you for the answers. I have another question. Are Chinese users closed off from the outside world? Where can I reach them? On WeChat? I don’t want to spam. I just want to find my target audience.
That’s a question for Bambu and Chinese users to respond. I did have seen several posts made by Chinese users on this forum. Can’t speculate on those who aren’t present/ posting on this forum, though.
I also wonder how may people are like me, when I’m in a 3D printing group and see a promoted model I very specifically don’t download it as a lot of the groups I’m in are for discussing 3d printing and I get sick of the spammy “download my model” posts. I even ignore actively good ones as I don’t want to encourage the clutter it causes. I suspect it is very group dependant but bound to be many other grumpy people like me!
Facebook shows ads to suckers who are likely to spend money only if you, the advertiser, also spend money. Otherwise you’re just in usergroups.
You’re also participating in the attention economy to receive dollars, (indirectly, based off attention/views/downloads and getting a stipend from your sponsor, makerworld) instead of participating in the real economy to receive dollars (directly, sell things or designs), so you are at the whims of ALL the algorithms that power that gross hulking monstrosity.
