If you do much in the way of Facebook advertising, odds are that you’ve started to hear the term “Facebook Power 5” more and more often in recent months.

To put it simply, the Facebook Power 5 is Facebook’s current best practice recommendation for advertisers. In a nutshell, the Facebook Power 5 is all about leveraging Facebook’s advertising algorithms to maximum effect. You put your campaigns in the almighty hands of the algorithms and Facebook promises that you’ll get the best possible results.

But is that a fair promise? Is the Facebook Power 5 all that it’s cracked up to be? Or is it mostly hype?

In this article, we’re going to take a look at where the Facebook Power 5 comes from, how to use it and whether or not you should consider adding it to your marketing bag of tricks. Let’s dig in.

Origins of the Facebook Power 5
Let’s be honest, running profitable, scalable Facebook Ads campaigns is hard. Five or six years ago, things were much less competitive and there were a variety of ways to make easy money on Facebook. It wasn’t right for every business, but if you could crack the code, it was an incredibly affordable way to drive leads and sales.

Today, however, advertising on Facebook is often an exercise in frustration. In 2016, Facebook reported that 3 million businesses were using Facebook Ads. By the end of 2019, that figure had more than doubled.

For many businesses, costs are increasing…while sales are decreasing. It’s become harder and harder for businesses—especially smaller businesses, who are one of Facebook’s biggest target audiences—to succeed on Facebook.

To further add to the problem, smaller businesses often lack the knowledge and expertise necessary to implement the involved, technically complex marketing strategies that have historically performed well on Facebook.

All of this created a bit of a conundrum for Facebook. To continue growing, they needed to find a way to simplify Facebook advertising to the point where anyone could be successful with Facebook Ads—even in Facebook’s highly competitive marketing landscape.

Facebook’s solution? The Facebook Power 5.

The Facebook Power 5 is essentially Facebook’s way of saying, “Don’t worry about figuring out our platform. Just put ads together the way we tell you to and we’ll take care of the rest.”

Even for seasoned advertisers, this is a very alluring proposition. We all know that Facebook has access to huge amounts of data, so it makes sense that they could use that data to deliver incredible marketing results. Less work and more results? Who wouldn’t want that?

We all want to believe that there’s a marketing silver bullet out there that will solve all of our problems, and the Facebook Power 5 is designed to appeal to that desire. But can Facebook marketing success really be that simple?