Social media marketing has evolved on so many levels and became a science that the best of us wake up to daily thinking how will we manage to catch up with the speed it is evolving against.  When I started out doing my own social media marketing and design, it was fun and every move was surprisingly educational.  At the time social media marketing was optional and more recreational.  It basically entailed the update of your website, playing around on Facebook and posting a picture or two.

If you’re already convinced you need Facebook advertising for your business, then contact us here. If not, then keep reading and surely, you’ll realize why Facebook advertising is a must for every business small, medium or large.

Facebook started out as an informal platform to connect with friends and family.  It was only in November 2007 Mark Zuckerberg introduced Facebook Ads, an ad system for businesses to connect with users and target advertising to the exact audiences they started their advertising platform. In 2012 they went from the world’s biggest social network to the world’s most closely watched young company in America, launching over a dozen new initiatives to make money off of you — you being its product, of course.

So obviously Facebook transition from social to business happened in a way that we barely noticed we became the product they are selling; and with this researchers have discovered trends in the way that we perform every major action on Facebook—liking, posting, sharing, commenting and even lurking. This entirely wasn’t by accident.

If the majority of the world’s online population spends time on Facebook, then policymakers, businesses, startups, developers, nonprofits, publishers, and anyone else interested in communicating with them will also, if they are to be effective, go to Facebook. That means they, too, must then play by the rules of one company. And that has implications for us all.

One element of Facebook that we may not realize is how often we use the Like to affirm something about ourselves. In a study of more than 58,000 people who made their likes public through a Facebook app, researchers discovered that Likes could predict a number of identification traits that users had not disclosed:

“Feeding people’s “likes” into an algorithm, information hidden in the lists of favorites predicted whether someone was white or African American with 95% accuracy, whether they were a gay male with 88% accuracy, and even identified participants as a Democrat or Republican with 85% accuracy. The ‘likes’ list predicted gender with 93% accuracy and age could be reliably determined 75% of the time.”

Now that we are on the same page and don’t have any misconceptions with regards to who is who in die world of Facebook, we have to figure out how best to work within the parameters set by Facebook, not forgetting that we are all swimming in a sea of algorithms gate keeping us from not playing by the rules.

As a Social Media Marketer there is a lot of frustrations when it comes to managing clients’ accounts.  The fact that most business owners still see Facebook as recreational and worst of all optional, they tend to think, it is either something that really has no value, or worst a quick fix that can be managed with less than 15 minutes a day o worst, one post twice a month.

One thing is for sure business owners small, medium or large, being ignorant about the value, time and science about Facebook, will be billed in the future.

Facebook Facts

It might be hard to believe but when you are using Facebook for business by creating a page, still this page is on Facebook only, not GOOGLE and is NOT owned by you. So you are at the mercy of Facebook the company, and so are your followers, data and any information relevant to your business. So you might want to think twice if you have founded your professional business on just a Facebook business page.

At the end of the day, Facebook promotion has become very strategic. If you don’t have a strategy, good content and a dedicated person or department to back up your performance – I’d advise to stay very, very far away from Facebook.

The Big Misconception of Facebook Marketing

Facebook social media marketing has no quick fixes. It is a relationship you have to dedicate time and effort to, not to mention to always be consistent.  Definitely not something you start doing when you want instant results.  It will take 24+ months to establish a solid foundation and something you will have to maintain.  It is no other than a real relationship, not something you get to do when you feel up to it, or have some time to spare.  It is a full time dedicated job, curating and sourcing information, design images, writing articles, posting on various platforms with different approaches to each and most of all a creative mental design to daily and frequently keep an eye on the performance of each.

We no longer can look at Facebook as a recreational playing field, and the sooner we get to terms with this valuable added tool, we will work this into the Marketing budget.

Next Article

We will compare having a Company Facebook page to a website for a business. What you need to know is that social media pages and presence are vital for sure, but not a replacement or a substitute for a business website.

By now, it is fairly clear to anyone paying attention that Facebook has pretty much won the social networking war with total market dominance. Same is true for business looking to scale and acquire new users. You are making a huge mistake if you are not leveraging all of the benefits of Facebook advertising.