Monday, December 19, 2011

Is Facebook important to your marketing communications programme?

Facebook seems to be a bit like Marmite. You either like it or hate it.

We have clients who really love Facebook and have embraced it as the lead platform in their social media strategy. On the other hand we also have clients who totally reject it, regarding it as having little to do with business. As an agency we are constantly looking for results that support the resource put into Facebook and preferably in the form of attributable sales leads. At present trackable actions via Google Analytics are pretty lightweight, so the response is lets put more resource into Facebook then for sure we will see positive results. But here's the thing, it is easy to see what other platforms offer. YouTube is a pretty neat way to publish videos and videos can be powerful ways of demonstrating products. Twitter is the darling of the news community and sticks to the simple format of posting headlines, immediately and as it happens and is both a source of news and route to publish your own news. Blogging is an informal diary style medium that offers the opportunity for comment and allows you to publish material that wouldn't interest the trade press. But what is Facebook really good at?

For a start visitors also need to be signed up to participate, but with 800 million or so world-wide that may not be an issue. Because we administer several different accounts I am always signing in and out and am  disturbed to see pictures of people's dogs, babies and other personal stuff turning up between company news. But then it is still really a personal platform - the business bit is kind of tacked on. But it is business that will pay for the advertising, not people sharing family pictures with friends. Friends are at the heart of Facebook, one article suggested on average people had 800 friends - that's a lot of dog and baby pictures - but in real life they might have just 4. Or perhaps none if they spend their lives tracking 800 fantasy friends! Is getting people to 'like' a company actually of value? if they like you so much they buy or recommend your product that is great, but b-2-b case studies providing such irrefutable evidence never seem to get mentioned.

Facebook's founder didn't come out too business-like in The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich and the movie The Social Network and Facebook appears more a phenomenon than a regular business which is despite this valued in billions of dollars. But then again so was the market in collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps, built on sub-prime mortgages by banks thought to be too big to fail. Maybe they have figured out what makes the Facebook phenomenon so valuable (other than advertising access to hundreds of millions) that will build a sustainable business that won't evaporate overnight or have its users migrate to the next new thing. Traditional advertising agencies are cautious about putting client's advertising money into new publications until circulation is properly established, audited and certified. Writing in iMediaConnection Douglas Kerr's article 8 reason's marketers can't trust Facebook raises issues of control, access, copyright and moreover investment by advertisers in the medium.

To use marketing speak, Facebook is a dilemma. For b-2-b businesses with modest marketing communications budgets the best advice right now is add it to the marketing programme but measure response carefully and don't invest at the expense of methods that are proven.

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