Facebook Marketing
Facebook is a much (read universally) spoken of yet exceptionally poorly understood tool for corporates. Here I will espouse my theoretical framework for milking this cow for all its worth. Herein I will outline in great detail where Facebook campaigns can work; how they should be implemented and where they are of little utility along with advice on how best to ascertain the difference at a glance.
Facebook – beyond the hype, beyond the plethora of uninformed if obnoxiously articulated opinions permeating the marketing and advertising spheres is a fantastic utility for the individual. This is a fact beyond reproach. At its core Facebook allows for the simulation of real-world relations whilst negating geographical separations in many qualitative ways. The market leader and pioneer in social networking websites also continues to evolve to accomplish this with ever increasing levels of user experience satisfaction and usefulness.
How though could a commercial entity best benefit from the implementation of marketing strategies via this medium? One needs to grasp that the competition comes from fellow advertisers; in effect there is an intellectual dual between vendors or those deployed on the vendors behalf to derive the most nuanced and more surgically correct target market niche for a given product or service. This requires a combination of precise analytic skills, formidable linguistic capacity and wide spectrum general knowledge on the part of the facebook marketing agent.
As with many other forms of marketing we should differentiate between the monkey see monkey do vendors whose service is thinly veiled glorified copy writing - charged on percentages of ad-spend - and service vendors who offer strategic planning, feasibility analysis, application of high level mathematical projections utilizing probability theory to gauge the likelihood of certain paid placement strategies returning a profit.
Facebook Advertising: Are you feeling lucky, punk?
In certain immature markets – South Africa for one – the former proliferate; and corporate clients are really going for a visit to the casino for all intents and purposes.
The potential for Facebook as the owner of a database I term the envy of the CIA to serve as a marketing platform and intermediary is frighteningly enormous. Consider that they have the personal details, best loved films, friendship networks of 600 million people – in their own words! It goes without saying that Facebook have barely scraped the surface of the financial potentials their innovation and aligned database could, should and in all likelihood are going to yield in the years ahead.
Facebook marketing is a form of consumer interaction that is surgically precise beyond anything even a Google Adwords could offer and available for volumes of consumers beyond any reasonable interpretation of the term critical mass and is thus a phenomenon that marketers and business owners will ignore to their peril and detriment.