Most evenings, before dinner I skim through the social media stuff on my iPad, primarily to see what my social media savvy clients are talking about. The same messages flash across Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, none us Instagram or Pinterest. Long ago I culled the people I follow on Twitter to clients only, made LinkedIn connections with people I actually know and abandoned Facebook, at least in terms of active participation. According to a report published by International Business Times, the young are leaving Facebook and the largest growth at 80.4% is the 55 and above age group. So as the youth defect to Snapchat and Tumblr, the Facebook audience is getting older. Oddly that corresponds with my experience that the people I know that use it at all are mainly retired, or old and still working. But not all. The weird cocktail of messages and photos that someone thinks funny or appealing are of cute dogs, babies, pictures of wise sayings on cards, quirky videos and engineering press releases I get elsewhere - or actually everywhere.
Now suppose the creators of Facebook had been asked to make a pitch in the Dragon's Den. Would the pitch have gone along the lines of, "we are a couple of university drop-outs writing code day and night for a web site for people like us locked away in a room who don't really socialise - and we need a few million dollars of your money to fund us." A rigorous analysis would have exposed a lack of a business plan and big questions over income. And yet they embarked on buying Instagram at $1 billion and now WhatsApp at a whopping $19 billion! Yes billions, not millions. When the quarterly results were announced at the end of last month, mobile advertising account for over half the ad revenue with CEO Zuckerberg saying 2013 was the year we turned our business into a mobile business.
A big issue here is despite the big numbers is a mobile advertising presence on Facebook a good deal for B2B marketers. It's not easy to demonstrate sales resulting from Facebook engagement amongst the clients I look at. The thing is does it work?
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