Of all social media platforms that I use, I’ve noticed that Facebook is really keen on being ‘personal’ with its users. It creates these cheesy – cute videos for you, be it based on your timeline activities or friendships (Friendversary what what), greets you, asks you what’s on your mind, celebrates your birthday, tells people when you post for the first time in a long time, takes you back the memory lane, I could go on and on… but point is, Facebook has developed (and still is developing) qualities of what we would consider a good friend.
And when I see that, I see a perfect place for marketing; let me share why…
It knows your target market.
Facebook ‘knows’ its users (by studying their habits and connecting the dots.), so it does a better job in channelling adverts to the more appropriate audience (target market) which is much more effective than just distributing them haphazardly. I remember it was only after I had at some point searched about Bluetooth item trackers on both Facebook and Google that Facebook started giving me the option of liking Track-R or Chipolo pages. This shows how closely it follows its users moves and as much as this may sometimes be freaky, it is very effective.
It trains you to use its marketing tools.
Because Facebook wants to be a friend, it not only helps you make a Facebook advert, but it also offers courses and tips on how to then make your adverts fly. So even as an individual at home, you can market your product digitally without really needing to go through a formal course or training. Added to that, it also gives you tips and tutorials on how to leverage on all its other marketing tools which include Facebook pages, Messenger and Instagram.
It is cheap and efficient.
Friends wouldn’t want to make you pay much for their services now would they? Exactly! Facebook allows you to market on their platform for a little as US$3.00 per post for a 24 hour period. Not only is that cheap considering that a mere 15 seconds mention by StarFM costs US$85.00 or let’s use an example with a similar time frame of 24 hours say the Chronicle (most read newspaper in Bulawayo) which charges US$180.00 for an A6 (15×3) black and white ad; but FB is conscious of the time of day and it affects its users thus it is able to strategically distribute your adverts to times where more users can see it in spite of the time you posted it.
It is familiar to the public
Facebook is a very social platform and people love informal things which means they are likely to read an ad on Facebook than on say, LinkedIn (well, that’s a personal observation so it’s open for discussion). I think this is so because there is a certain rigidness (for lack of a better word) that comes with things labelled as formal or anything along those lines. So since Facebook is a platform which people often use for fun, it means users will readily consume and process information they find there than on other formal platforms.
Lots of people use it
This one is a given. So far, Facebook has user-base of about 1.8 billion users around the globe and if you haven’t noticed, that’s approximately a quarter of the world’s population! Bringing it home, according to the little survey we carried out, most Zimbabweans use their internet mainly for two things and Facebook is one of them. To further back this up, you’ll discover that all our MNOs have a special package for Facebook which says a lot… and whether it was the demand that drove the decision or it was the decision that attracted demand, that’s something else; otherwise the bottom line is most internet users in Zimbabwe use Facebook regularly. And that right there is good enough reason for one to consider Facebook marketing as an effective marketing strategy.
Done right, FB can surely help your business grow…
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