Facebook & its' Social Impact...

This blog is about a well known topic but focuses on few points that you have never thought about before.

For Facebook (FB), no introduction needed. In Sri Lanka it’s the most popular social network. It suppose to attract and it’s targeted for young adults and matured people. But according to the consumer report survey, May 2011 there are 7.5 million children under 13 with FB accounts and 5 million under the age of 10 which happens to be a violation of terms and conditions of FB ultimately.

No one can control this situation. For a person who wish to join FB needs only an e mail account.It’s that simple. This simplicity of sign up might be a reason for this negative trend.

However, despite the fact that children under age use FB, it creates a very good platform to maintain relationships with family and friends who are not around and to make new friends around the world. Further it acts as a communication medium for the businesses and individuals. FB ultimately has created a new standard of social acceptance since it has been more of a necessity now a days.

Facebook can be considered as an advancement of human networking but still there is a negative social impact. As of September 2012, FB had over 1 million users of which 8.7% profiles are fake. Therefore through these fake profiles things that are harmful for the society can happen since those can’t be tracked as to whom the profile belongs to.

Today FB has been a cause to many broken relationships. It might not be FB who should bear the full responsibility but it has been aiding the roots of problems and issues.

Not only that it can be said that because of FB the value or the quality of human relationships has reduced to a level that a friend can be defined solely in terms of the fact that whether they are in your FB profile or not.

In Sri Lanka FB is a fast growing social network. Therefore the users should be intelligent enough to overcome the negetives discussed above and to take advantages of it properly.  

User Vs Consumer In Facebook

Customers are the most important people for any organization. They are the resource upon which the success of the business depends. People first become prospects and then moved to customer. In Digital marketing prospects of the organization is internet users. According to the www.internetworldstats.com Sri Lanka internet penetration is 15% as at 30 June, 2012. Most probably it has shifted to 20% within last 11 months. These 20% people in Sri Lanka are really prospects for organization when doing Facebook advertising?

Most of the Sri Lankan people are engaged with Facebook. It’s about 60% of the internet penetration. Most of the companies are doing marketing activities on Facebook as a tool of digital marketing tool. As per the data given by www.socialbakers.com Mobitel is the one who has more local fans on Facebook. They have got 281,592 fans. But it’s only about 0.11% of the Facebook users in Sri Lanka. With that amount Mobitel can reach at least 25% of the SL Facebook users. Because when a fan like or share Mobitel stuff automatically it shares with his/her friends who are not engage with Mobitel too. I think these 281,592 likes are not the real loyal or interested customers of Mobitel. We need to consider how many fans from our fan base will be added as our customers. We are doing advertising on Facebook to gain customers for the company. We need convert user into customer. Basically we need to identify user pattern of SL Facebook users. Then we can handle effective campaign via Facebook.

I have identified few areas which we need to concern before the advertising on Facebook. Those are,

# Some people are on Facebook just for the sake of having a Facebook account. They are not actively doing it & some even don’t know how to.

# Sometimes people like on some pages because of their friends like on it. It’s not display his/her real loyalty/Interested. Sometimes people requested personally to like on some pages.

# Age - Most of the people engage with Facebook are teenagers. Every Brand’s target Market is not engage with Facebook. Most of people in Facebook are not taking decision on household requirements.

# Negative comment can make huge lose to the Brand. If one person expresses his/her idea in negative way, it will damage brand seriously.

Now we have to face this kind of problems. But we can minimize this risk. However it’s better to engage with Facebook advertising for organization. If they fail with 20% Sri Lankan is better than fail with 50% Sri Lankan in the future. Anyway in the future Facebook will be a good place for marketing. That time we can reach teenage, matured and the entire population with developing technology in Sri Lanka.

How Facebook Target a Niche Audience with Facebook Advertising

Facebook is an online social networking service. It is the most famous social media network in the world. Basically it started as a social network where people can connect and share ideas online. But with the growth of facebook usage this has become an attractive platform for advertising. Most of the companies are doing advertising on Facebook. Facebook is not only for the advertising. Through facebook we can have more publicity on any subject. But now a days facebook advertising has become the most benefited advertising tool for business+Brands.  

Before doing a promotion campaign business consider, whether the promo campaign reach the target customers and its cost. When considering these two factors facebook perform well. In our topic we consider about niche market. Those who satisfy special needs of people, they are not going to engage with mass media to carry out their promotions. Therefore this is a better way to promote niche businesses. They don’t need to consider all facebook users. They can target people who are interested on their subject very easily via facebook.

Let’s see what we can do on facebook,

We can create a facebook page for a selected brand or company. Creating facebook page is a very simple task. We have to follow a few steps to create a page. We don’t need to pay to create a page, It is totally free, we can add information and photos of the selected brand or company.

Then we can invite our selected audience to engage with our page, they can like on our page and get updates of the page everyday. We can use facebook advertising option to grab the correct people to our selected brand or company. We have to pay for it but it’s not a higher margin. We can use Targeting option to filter our target audience. In targeting option we can see few bases such as,

·         Location

·         Age and Birthday

·         Interest

·         Education

·         Connection

Using above techniques we can reach our target audience, but it’s not enough, therefore we need to make daily updates to keep in touch with people who are interested about your page. It will gain additional benefit when people like the post, it will get published on their wall. Then there is a possibility to reach his\her friends also.

Having a facebook page is not enough to create sales or inquiries about the selected brand or company. We have to maintain and update it to get maximum benefit from it.

With the development of social media, facebook is not the only media to target niche audience. Now even other social media becoming popular, but in Sri Lankan context facebook plays a huge role up to now. Anyway there is possibility to change it, therefore we as Sri Lankans should get updated with new things!!!