The advantages of advertising on Facebook

Have you ever been scrolling the pages of Facebook, possibly reading about your friends lives through the news feed or creeping someone's photos all while you are supposed to be writing that paper (or blog post), then looked over at the right hand side of the screen to see all the ads? Well, a great deal of those ads reach your eyes because they are tailored specifically for you.

A simple Google search of "advertising on Facebook" brought up the Advertising page on the website. Here, potential advertisers are greeted by a page giving an overview of the benefits of advertising through Facebook. In fact, the tag line on the page says, "Reach over 500 million people where they connect and share." The overview provides you with how you can reach your target audience, deepen your relationships with customers, as well as control your budget. All very important aspects to marketers. If you still aren't convinced you can click on the case studies tab and get a much more detailed explanation of how everything works as well as fact-filled support of why it is a good idea for your company.

The first page in the case studies tab is about reaching your target audience and it shows how a photography company was able to design there advertisements to show up on the pages of women ages 24-30 whose relationship status said they were engaged. There were also facts showing how the cost of advertising was worth it when you consider the amount of revenue it can produce, and how ads viewed through Facebook were more likely to be viewed versus off Facebook.

Some might be a little concerned with the fact that people can advertise in this way, but as it is your demographic information is public and as far as I can tell, nothing unethical is presenting itself in this form of advertising.

Social Media Campaign Success

With the concept of marketing products through social media platforms still relatively new, many people are looking for success stories to get a better idea of how to do it effectively. One such story comes from Dunkin' Donuts and how they used a contest through Facebook and Twitter to market their new product, the "Coolata."

The company's goal was to gain access to "friends of friends" and to give recognition to, as well as reward, brand supporters. The contest consisted of customers buying any kind of "Coolata," taking a "cool" looking picture of yourself with the product clearly visible, then making that picture your profile picture on Facebook as well as posting on Dunkin' Donuts Facebook Wall. People who completed these steps were then entered to win all kinds of prize each day; winners were chosen at random.

The campaign generated a tremendous amount of buzz for Dunkin' Donuts. There Facebook Fan page now has over 800,000 fans and their Twitter account nearly doubled it's followers, increasing from 23,000 to 43,000.

The reason this ad campaign was so successful was due to many factors. First of all, it didn't feel like an ad campaign to consumers; it was fun and engaging and had a mix of on-line and off-line experiences for them. Obviously, whenever the people at Dunkin's sat down and came up with this idea, they did a fantastic job of carrying it through and thinking out all aspects of it. The cost for the campaign was minimal compared to the benefits they generated from it.

Social Media and its affect on your professional life

With the very broad area of social media being utilized in some form or fashion by more and more people, it should come as no surprise that the use of these mediums is starting to spill over in to peoples professional life. Often times, the use of social media, as it relates to the workplace, has a negative connotation to it. There are countless stories of people having a "Facebook" status about how much they hate there job, or sending out a "tweet" complaining about their boss, only to be fired later. According to the article Can Complaing About Your Boss on Facebook Get You Fired? by Mikal Belicove, there is one particular instance where a woman complaining about her supervisor got her fired. While there are many cases where social media causes problems for employees, there are instances where social media can be helpful to people.

There are plenty of sites out there, such as LinkedIn, that allow people to connect with all kinds of people and market themselves to potential employers. In fact, I don't think that people should be afraid to post things on Facebook or other sites. Instead, use the potential it has for a wide array of viewers to market yourself to people who may be looking to hire you.

Is Social Media Marketing a fad, or here to stay?

The question posed to me for this first week is whether or not social media marketing is a fad. The quick and simple answer that I have is that, as long as social media is being used, there will be businesses who are using it to reach their customers.
As it is, the use of social media is growing by leaps and bounds. Currently Facebook and Twitter are the most popular forms of social media, but it also extends in to blogs and other forms of social interaction on the internet. Because these forms of social media are so widely used, marketers are exploiting them to market to their target group.
It seems to me that social media, itself, is not a fad. People have a strong desire to socialize with other people. Couple that with the constant advancement in technology, and you can see that it will now and forever more be an avenue people take to communicate with one another.Marketers understand where they need to go to reach the consumer, so I don't think they will be abandoning the use of marketing through social medias anytime soon.

Will Stuart