If I learned anything from MIS 301 during my freshman year, it is that a stagnant business strategy is doomed to fail. Also, something about a “fitness landscape,” which was a buzzword that guaranteed participation points if used correctly. In light of the need to adapt, to avoid stagnant strategy, many companies today are engaging in social media marketing. The other day, the summer camp that have been involved with for my entire life asked me to be his… er, her?...I mean, its friend on Facebook. I haven’t rightly figured out who is personifying Camp Grady Spruce, but I will admit the alias has been quite informative on the happenings of camp. Although Camp Grady Spruce has been a late arriver to this trend of social media marketing, it is a great example of how a wide variety of companies are utilizing social media to improve the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.
With over 500 million active users, Facebook is one of the most influential social media mediums. A newly hired intern would be able to see the obvious marketing potential of Facebook, I mean, even the guy who didn’t get the internship would understand. Of the 500 million users, 50% log on in any given day. For the mathematically challenged, that is a potential market reach of 250 million users daily. For internet advertising, this is an obvious high-profit situation, where ads should be selling for ludicrous amounts. Ingeniously though, some companies have found a way to utilize the reach of Facebook without paying a dime. As I mentioned with Camp Grady Spruce, companies can simply log on and create their own account. The biggest hurdle then is to get a substantial amount of friends, more specifically friends that are willing and able to purchase your product.
As I am biased towards Camp Grady Spruce, I am hesitant to use them as a success story for Facebook marketing… leaving me with no personal experience with successful campaign. In my opinion though, utilizing Facebook doesn’t seem to be a difficult task in reaching consumers. The two main ways that marketers can reach customers via Facebook is through site advertisements and company profiles. With site advertisements, there is obviously a premium needed to pay for the cost of the advertisement. These ads though have the potential to be highly effective as they can be tailored to reach a specific group of those on Facebook given particular aspects of their profile information. The cheaper of the two methods though is definitely to create a profile for the company. This is a free option as Facebook is a free networking tool. The challenge is getting people to view your profile. The most effective method would be to start by adding incentives to add the company as a friend and then other incentives to view the profile frequently. For example, the first 1000 friends could be entered to win a gift card for ONE BILLION DOLLARS! Obviously this is not realistic, but some incentive could be used. Then, once they have gained a decent number of friends, incentivize those friends to return to the site frequently by adding coupons habitually to the profile, encouraging friends to return to the site.
The main downside for marketing through Facebook is the limited reach of certain segments. The vast majority of users are ages 17-25. Reaching users above that age, which marks a large purchasing segment of society. At some point it just becomes weird if that group is actively on Facebook.
