LN#5 : How Facebook Marketing is changing the face of business and why you should delve in it?too.
Gary Vaynerchuk opened one his seminars asking people whether they have heard the name of a company called Wish.com. No hands were raised. It was then he told them that this company’s turnover is more than 6 Billion dollars. Then he waited for few seconds to note their reactions and they were spot-on what he was expecting.
Wish. Com is an e-commerce company like eBay and Amazon started by two young programmer friends at google and yahoo, which sell products directly to its customers and the most astonishing fact about that company is that it spends nearly 98% of its marketing money on Facebook advertising.
I reckon that when Facebook was opened to people in 2004 anybody literally thought that it would become such a giant marketing tool.
As of 2018, it boasts of more than 2. 3 billion active users. When Myspace died a few years after the advent of Facebook, the active users of myspace literally emptied by 2012. Orkut suffered the same fate. People thought maybe in a few years Facebook will face the same destiny.
Facebook proved them wrong. In fact, the destiny of Facebook is on ever-rising slope ever since they came into existence. The recent scandals like the Cambridge Analytica Data Scandal that maligned the name of Facebook briefly did not affect its user base, instead, it just kept on growing.
That is where the genius of Zuckerberg comes in. He didn’t start gloating in the glory of his billions of dollars in the bank and neither he got immersed in the intoxication of his massive popularity, instead he invested his time in researching, data finding and changing Facebook to make it better and better year after year, something that Orkut and Myspace didn’t do and you know what happened to them.
Facebook has become the premier marketing tool for business companies, top fortune 500 companies too, to promote their websites, products, values, contents and what not.
Earlier it was difficult to market your product as there were no absolute means. Companies hired marketing teams, advertising teams, research teams, analytics team which would cost them millions of bucks with no guarantee of sure shot results.
But today, all that team of hundreds of people have got concentrated to just one person whose only qualification is that he knows how to do facebook. Anyone on Facebook can open his page for free and do his own marketing, advertising, research, analytics and get done with all the work in few hours, costing him only a few hours and literally no money.
The old concept of opening an office and operating from there so that you meet people and impress them with your team, work and infrastructure has gone in the past and is now well replaced with a Facebook page where you can show your entire infrastructure, team and work where both the parties can see it from the convenience of their home and do business in their pyjamas.
Social networks earlier were just social networks but today nearly every social network has turned itself into a marketing tool and is helping thousands of business and startups to sell their ideas, profiles and products.
I pity people who are on facebook and yet avoid talking to people on it, refrain from adding friends on it and protect their profile like it has some secret information when the entire premise of social media is to share your life with other people. If it contains personal stuff, it is your fault so you better not put it there. It is as simple as that.
I use Facebook for my personal benefits. not for sharing my personal life. These days meeting people in their offices is very difficult so I contact most of the people on Facebook and nearly every time they would reply to me without ever asking where my office is.
I don’t have to take appointments anymore and I don’t have to bother calling their secretary again and again and bombarding them with my resume and visiting card. My profile is now my resume and my profile is now my visiting card.
Most importantly I have used Facebook to arrange workshops, seminars and inform people about my work. Imagine this – earlier I had to make DVDs and CDs of my work and force people to watch them because there was process attached to it on their part also. They had to take the DVDs out, put it on the DVD player and watch it but they would close it if the first few seconds were not good. Most of the time they would not even watch it.
Today however they will at least take a look because they don’t have to do anything. While scrolling their feed if my video pops up, it plays automatically and no matter whether they chose to watch it or not, they get to at least know about it.
I also use Facebook as a means to update myself on what is going in the world and in the lives of people. I am a filmmaker and facebook updates me about who is doing what in the film industry all the time. My entire knowledge of the film industry and whos who mostly comes from Facebook. Facebook is my magazine, my directory and my newspaper.
When Facebook realized that marketers are using its users to promote their products through profiles, messages and pages they started offering their own services.
Now you don’t even have to own a website to become influential on the internet. All you have to do is make a facebook page, post content and start increasing your followers so that you can shout about your products and work on it.
Yes, I do understand that with due course of time the digital marketing on Facebook and other platforms have become complex and now there are courses offered to teach people how to reap the maximum benefits from it.
Institutes like IIMs and other top universities all across the world now have Digital marketing as a major in their curriculum. Philips Kotler has even written a book about Digital Marketing. So yes, the abundant case studies and the analytics is a little complex, but then it is an only a little complex. I can assure you that if you will watch only ten videos on any digital marketing topic, you won’t need the eleventh video to find yourself expert in doing it. It is not obvious but at the same time, it is not that difficult that only people with a certain degree can understand it.
However, let me make it easy for you. No one still knows exactly how the digital marketing works and the more rules and case studies they are creating every week, more exceptions to those rules and case studies are popping up every day on the internet. They are guessing in the guise of chapter names and specific works, that’s it.
If you meet a digital marketer, he would throw heavy words on you like CPC, CPA, CPM, CTR, organic views, backlinks, bounce rates, crawler and many more but when you get to know what they mean you will realize that they are just random jargons and means the most obvious thing. Like CPC means cost per click. How difficult it is to decipher it? Backlinks are links to previous articles in the current articles that take you to other articles which helps in increasing user time on your website. Was that difficult to know? I don’t think so.
Facebook is pretty easy and simple to use. Just remember this one rule – show, don’t tell.
Put a lot of photos on Facebook to attract people to your page. There might be things which you think are not very important which you can put in simple text and post it as a status but try to avoid that. Try putting texts on photos and ahem, try to attach a human face next to it. It affects people psychologically and makes them want to read it. The mind thinks in terms of images and the more images you will use to define your ideas, the more successful you will get.
Facebook does not have too many restrictions on their posts like many other social networks. Some websites only allow photos, some allow mostly texts but Facebook allows everything and the interface it uses is really simple which makes it all the more useful for people, even people who haven’t handled internet before. My parents who are not tech savvy can use only Facebook and WhatsApp on their mobile. I tried introducing them to other social networks but they just don’t get it. There is a reason why more than 2 billion people are using it every day.
You don’t have to employ yourself in posting content every day. The best part of social media networks these days is that they are very friendly to marketing people and inviting more and more people to use their platform to promote their products. Making it complex will limit its use too few specialized people. The interface of Facebook is designed simple because they want more and more people to feel powerful and not helpless. If they find you suffering from a problem and simultaneously they find more users suffering from the same problem than they will introduce a new algorithm to make it useful for you. That is why they keep collecting data from users, their browsing patterns and keep asking them for their reviews. Constant updates on their interface is what makes facebook stand out.
Use Facebook wisely and it can turn your business into an overnight success. There are numerous courses like LinkedIn Learning, Lynda, Udemy and myriads videos on YouTube to teach you everything you want to know about it. Start working.