Marketing Implications of the Facebook Takeover
Writing by Brick Marketing in Social Media
Facebook has become a huge part of our everyday culture. With over 600 million users, its power continues to grow and grow. People sign on to Facebook multiple times a day to do everything from check up on their friends, view pictures, post status updates, play games, send messages, and find news about a favorite TV show or product. It has become a primary way to connect with friends, family, colleagues, and businesses that offer products or services of interest. It’s hard to imagine a time when Facebook didn’t exist. How did everyone keep in touch? Facebook has really evolved since it launched in 2004. What began as a place for college students to connect has become one of the most visited websites across the world by users of all ages and backgrounds. It continues to improve upon its offerings and you have to begin to wonder, if you can do almost everything on Facebook, are other websites or forms of communication even necessary?
If you pay any attention to marketing at all, you’ve noticed that right along with listing a business website a company will also tell their audience to follow them on Facebook and Twitter. If the communication is online, a direct link to these pages is provided. In some advertisements the website isn’t even listed. Only the Facebook page is promoted. In many cases, a business can provide the same information on their Facebook page as they can on their website. Facebook is also starting to get into the e-commerce game allowing brands, celebrities, and merchants to sell directly from their Facebook page and from the new Facebook mall with their new Payvment E-Commerce Storefront free app. The thought is that more conversions will be made if the user can purchase immediately without having to leave Facebook.
There has been quite a bit of talk about how Facebook’s “takeover” will affect the current state of website design and development, blog writing, and email communication. While Facebook does offer a page that is works in a similar fashion to a website, and message services that allow a business to spread a targeted message similar to what is done on a blog or in email, the user has much less control over it all. For example, a business website can be designed in any way that the company wants. It can have as many internal pages as the company sees necessary and be set up specifically with that company’s target audience in mind. Facebook pages are all pretty much set up the same, limiting what the page owner can do creatively. There are also content limitations on a Facebook page. A company can operate a blog that allows them to write freely about a topic or send an email newsletter that provides more information than what there is room for on a Facebook page. For now, I’d say that it’s still necessary for a company to operate its own website, blog, and email newsletter program. However, it’s always possible that that could change at some point in the future if Facebook continues to thrive. We never know what tricks Mark Zuckerberg may have up his sleeve.
