Facebook- The End is Nigh?

An article was published on January the 20^th here  on the Ad Contrarian. Its follow up article was posted a few days later here 

As the title of the article says, it aimed to talk about the collapse of social media. Supposedly once this gold mine and new frontier of advertising, much like the dotcom bubble, all the wizened figures telling you Social Media was the next big thing, had it wrong.

Looking at the first article, it talks about how companies spending loads of money on Social Media campaigns, are not making ANY return on investment, and that you’d be 40% better off doing targeted email campaigns.

I reacted to this article, discussing it with friends and clients. You cannot base a marketing campaign on Social Media alone. And, you can’t SELL on social media. There are ads down the right hand side of your Facebook feed, if you don’t have a good adblocker, and there are those targeted ads which appear on your Facebook wall. You know they are ads, you can over-look them and not feel offended.

But if you have joined a group, or if you have liked a Page of a product, you don’t want to be SOLD to. It is one of the golden rules- inform and entertain, don’t sell. So, you use Social Media to gain interest and trust, and then grab people and send them to your website, sign up for your newsletter, or something like that.

How? Write a blog, regularly, once a week, or every two weeks. In the newsletter, have stories which you need to CLICK HERE to finish the article. Have advertising in your newsletter, sure, special subscriber-only specials.

This is how you use Social Media. As someone in the comments said- “The person who does social media without anyone else is as idiotic as the person who just does outdoor.”

You cannot have Social Media marketing in isolation. You cannot think- I will go on Facebook and suddenly I will have PROFIT! It needs to be part of the whole to work.

Part 2 of this article talked about ‘The Conversation’, in what I believe is a cynical light. Facebook and Twitter are where your customers are at. They FOLLOW you or LIKE you because THEY want to. So, just by that alone you have their permission to talk to them. However, if what you say isn’t very interesting or fun, they won’t speak back.

This article says this is inevitable, that the famed ‘conversation’ never was going to happen. But I can tell you, if you’re at a party, and you’re boring, and uninteresting, even in real life, no one is going to talk to you.

I have seen Facebook pages where clients are passionate about the company. Post a photo of a new room after some designers have waved their magic style wands, or upload some new fashion, and they all talk about how great it is. Within seconds that one post has reached over 500 people.

And if you check the analytics and insights tab, you can tell when more of your audience is online, and pitch your content at the right time, and BANG, interaction, comments and a conversation!

I will agree that the famed walls full of customers talking to each other didn’t happen. That happens more on Twitter, more than anywhere else. But, people DO talk on social media. It is there, it IS happening.

I have read predictions of the dire straits of Social Media in 2014. With the youth market jumping ship into Instagram and Snapchat, how Google+ was the Little Social Network that could almost… But that makes news, doesn’t it? People want to hear about DISASTER! And MAYHEM! Or, they want to read about how ThIS COULD CHANGE YOUR LIFE! No one really wants to read about- oh yeah, it’s good, Facebook is going to keep on truckin’.

The internet, as a meta object, is inevitable. Once something has been created, it will always be. Sure, Myspace disappeared, but it HAS made a comeback. Also, other social media networks grew up around it. Social Media marketing is always going to be a part of the internet. It is not going to go away, and it is not going to slow down, shrink, or become less of a beast than it already is.