Facebook: The Rising Star in the Marketing World

Marketing is primarily the most important part of any business or organization. An efficient and effective marketing strategy will ensure the success of your business. In this era; the use of technology is on the rise.

There are many channels where you can advertise your business/product or service online. Advertising through social media has been proving to be quite a proficient platform for digital marketing.

Facebook being the largest social network in the world, has approximately more than 2.20 billion active users, and more users are joining every day. Studies have shown that around 66
% of these users login and use the website on a regular basis.

With such a large user base; not utilizing Facebook for marketing can be quite foolish, because there is a high chance that your ideal target market is active on Facebook every day.

Advertising through Facebook provides you with a very versatile and resourceful platform. You can easily specify the type of people you are looking for. Through Facebook marketing, it has become quite easy task to target your preferred audience as well as their location, interests and much, much more!

What sort of people are on Facebook?

Though Facebook might have started out as a website for college students, but now people of almost every age group and profession use it. Studies have shown that the use of Facebook is most popular with the age bracket of 18-29 years. The use becomes less popular with an increase in age, making it least popular with people who are above 60 years of age. Irrespective of what age group you are targeting, it’s highly likely that you will find a huge chunk of your target market on Facebook

How to Market on Facebook?

Facebook has basically three marketing options to offer,

1. Pages
2. Ads
3. Groups

Pages: These are similar to profile pages of users, except they are used for businesses, organizations, public figures and brands. The privacy settings are automatically set to “Public” which means they can be easily accessed by all Facebook users.

By “liking” and “following” a page, users can easily be notified and updated with all the news regarding your business. The best feature about using Facebook pages as part of your digital marketing is that, they are totally free of cost.

Ads:Facebook offers a brilliant advertising platform. With the help of Facebook you can target your ads to specified demographics. You can easily select your target area, age group you want to reach, education levels etc.  Ads can be linked directly to your Facebook page or to your official sites outside of Facebook. By using Facebook ads, you can also specify what sort of search devices you want to target. The only negatives of using Facebook ads is that they are paid ads that can cost you quite a bit of money. The other setback is that Facebook gives its users options of hiding ads that they don’t want to see.

Groups: Facebook groups are also free of cost but prove to be quite time consuming. You can create groups to try and reach out to your potential target audience. There are a number of privacy settings on groups that you can modify according to your preferences. Groups have a higher level of engagement than pages and are usually joined by users who have a considerably serious interest in your business.

Source: makeuseof

How to make your Facebook marketing effective:

• Post useful and stimulating links about your product/business
• To further attract customers, you can post coupon codes for special discounts
• Post about new products on your Facebook page or group
• Make sure that the content you post is useful and attention-grabbing
• You can also post polls to ask questions from your fans. This will help you find out customer preferences and help understand their needs and enable you to design your product in a way that caters to your customer’s needs
• Facebook provides you with group or page statistics as well. Make sure to utilize these statistics to maximize your fan pages and increase your audience.

With Facebook introducing new features every day like Facebook Live Video, Facebook shopping tab, Facebook events, Music stores etc., more and more users are joining every day and the current users are finding the social networking website more interactive, user friendly as well as useful.

Advertising on Facebook is reasonably inexpensive than advertising on Google. Also, Facebook video views are less costly than those of YouTube. Facebook can prove to be a strong and versatile platform for Public Relations. With the use of Facebook it has now become easier to obtain customer feedback and response.

With new users joining every day, Facebook can play a significant role in your digital marketing strategy. Integrating Facebook into a business’s overall marketing strategy should be done meticulously and only when the cost-benefit analysis has been carried out.

Facebook can prove to be a game changer for the marketing department and emerging trends indicate that it is indeed being used more by marketers who are looking to advertise their businesses in a more effective and cost-efficient fashion and reaching a far vast and versatile audience in doing so.