Facebook, the social media giant launched in 2004 and became a massive hit within a short period of time. This social network was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes when all of them were students at the Harvard University.
Initially, the company’s name was FaceMask, which was later altered to The Facebook, and eventually ‘The’ was dropped from the name and it was rechristened as Facebook. Initially, Zuckerberg and his co-founders developed the space for the students of Harvard University to network with each other, and now the company has 2.85 billion users worldwide. The annual revenue by the company in 2020 was $85.965B as reported by Facebook.
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Facebook has expanded its services over the last 17 years by bringing message services, photo, video sharing, and many more components to its platform. Acquisitions have become a key move for the company, by buying their potential competitors before they get big and for that sometimes it offers exceptionally high prices. In 2012, the company managed to acquire Instagram with a cost of $1 billion, WhatsApp with a cost of $19 Billion.
Recently, Facebook also acquired Kustomer with a deal of $1 billion.
Facebook: the marketing hub
This social media giant, which initially aims to connect people with family, friends, and colleagues socially has turned into the marketing spot. According to a report by Statis, India has 340 million active users, which has surpassed the number in countries like US, Indonesia, and Brazil with 200 million,140 million, and 130 million. This has made it a lucrative space from the marketing point of view as the reach of marketing on Facebook is vast.
Through Facebook marketing brands can promote their products and services to a massive audience. Over the last decade, Facebook has shifted from being the most prominent social media channel on the internet into one of the biggest marketplaces.
And, it allows you to do cross channel marketing, you can do a promotion mix with email marketing, mobile marketing, Facebook ads that will create a promotion mix to create a brand outreach.
Marketing Makeover in the post-pandemic
Ever since the outbreak of coronavirus, digital marketing has become a fuel of marketing. With many companies investing lakhs of money in digital marketing. Customers are making a drastic change from brick and mortar stores to digital stores.
Here’re some key points that retailers are making a shift to the digital channels-
Safer Shopping- According to Facebook Business, 71% of people now say safety is key when deciding where to shop and this behavior is turning at a global level. The company also added it they saw a sex time increase in conversations related to shopping and living. This data primarily shows that people are not stopping in buying terms rather they are making a shift by using different techniques such as BOPIS and online shopping.
Glocal community- Many small businesses closed down during the lockdown and were forced to make a digital presence. According to Facebook, the clicks on local businesses increased by 23% from Feb to May 2020.
Benefits of Facebook Marketing
- Reach a wider audience – It is assumed that Gen Z is shifting to other social media platforms. But, the decision-making power of the house is in the hand of millennials. According to the report by Statista, Facebook has 62% of users who fall under the category of 18 and 34 years old, and 38% of users are from 35 to 65 years.
Due to this, marketers can attract a wide spectrum of audiences.
- Aligned with both B2B and B2C Business – B2B only uses apps like Twitter, Facebook, and Twitter. According to a Hubspot report, 74% of people use Facebook for professional purposes.
- Precise Targeting – Facebook allows you to deeply segment your audience and pick the best options for you. You can target the audience according to the demographics, and moreover you can select it by the income group, educational level, life events, relationship status or job.
- Campaigns- Facebook allows you to create for majorly 3 purposes that is Awareness, Consideration and Conversion.Facebook advertising costs, on average, $0.97 per click and $7.19 per 1000 impressions. Ad campaigns focused on earning likes or app downloads can expect to pay $1.07 per like and $5.47 per download, on average
- SEO – While ranking pages, Google pulls all the information that is available on social media. Typically, Facebook plays a large segment that creates a social footprint and dominates the credibility and good search ranking.
Facebook’s major part of the revenue comes through advertising. According to the Wall Street Journal report, the advertising revenue of the company rose to 46 % with a value of $25.44 billion in 2021.This clearly shows Facebook marketing has not died yet. As the number of users is also increasing day by day, it has less chances that it will pass away. Despite the popularity of other media, Facebook still contributes 15-20 mins of everyone’s life. As the rumours buzzing around that social media is dying, it will not die soon..
