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.