I keep reading articles online talking about the demise of Facebook and how Facebook is losing favor with teens and mainly being used by older people. I never understood that notion since whenever I am on Facebook, all of my teenage family members are very active on there and their friends. As a Facebook marketer, I am always looking up what’s new and always open to learning how to use Facebook better. I am also a member of different Facebook groups catered to Facebook marketers. One such group is managed by the queen of Facebook herself, Mari Smith. About one week ago, a member of the group posted that she was in a business masterclass and someone announced that Facebook would be dead in 5 to 7 years.
Whenever I hear these pronouncements, I am always taken aback and wondered what reasoning people use to qualify these statements.I recently hosted a workshop in Trinidad and Tobago on Social Media Marketing, and one week later, I spoke on Digital Citizenship at the Canada Safe School Network 20/20 conference. In both events, I talked to young people, and I asked the same question at the beginning. How many of you use Facebook? In both cases, all hands went up. So I think it’s safe to say, Facebook is not dead amongst young people, and it’s not fully aging up as many people claims.
I am not doubting that other emerging platforms like snap chat is very popular amongst young people. But I am clearly stating that anybody that think Facebook is dead will die soon or is not being used by young people, like biggie small said, they’re dead wrong. I am a Facebook Marketer, so I guess anyone will expect me to be in support of Facebook. However, it’s the only platform that allows businesses to combine marketing and sales fully. Facebook’s advertising product is one of the most impressive out there. I’d go as far as to say, it’s the best, the best because it allows you to spend as little as $5 a day and advertise to your exact target audience. If you are trying to reach Women between the ages of 25 and 40 that are interested in entrepreneurship and live in New York City, you can. You can run an ad targeting only these people, and your ad will not show to anybody else, so you know your money will be well spent. Now, because you can target the exact people you want to reach, does that mean they will respond, the answer is no. You need to ensure that your copy and creative is great as well.
Gary Vee is known for saying that the ultimate assets in business today is time and attention. If you want to capture people’s attention on Facebook, your creatives and your copy need to be compelling. If not, they will just continue scrolling through their news feed. By now, everyone should know that Facebook owns Instagram, and the ad product on Instagram is as impressive as it is advertising on Facebook. With Instagram, Facebook is providing advertisers a whole new platform to reach their target audience.
I am very impressed with Facebook’s push towards videos; I don’t think they will take over Youtube anytime soon, to be honest. However, they are giving Youtube a lot of competition. One of the reasons content creators were initially reluctant to create video content for Facebook was because they were not able to make money the way they could on Youtube. Personally, I (redundancy I know) hate those instream ads on Youtube; I hate when I am watching a video or about to watch a video, and I have to wait 15 seconds or more for an ad to play before I can watch it. But, hey, that’s the price of consuming “free” content there. Facebook, however, recently released two updates that will actually go head to head with Youtube. The first one is a new placement in their ad product for instream video ads, so just like Youtube, if you are running an ad and want it to show up before video starts, you can select that as a placement. They are still targeting the user, which means, two people may be watching the same video, and one may see an ad and the next one may not. I think that’s cool, but I am sure when I start seeing those ads, it will bug me as it bugs me on youtube.
The other update is the ability for content creators to make money from their live videos. If you go live for more than 4 minutes and have an audience of over 300 people you can insert commercial break video ads during your live stream and you will receive 55% of the money paid to Facebook to run that video ad. Now, your page needs to have at least 2000 fans, but hey, this will be a total game changer. Now, people that go live and talk smack and have a lot of people following them will be able to make some money. This is currently only available to profiles and pages in the US, but I am sure it will roll out to the rest of the world soon. I am pretty excited at this prospect of monetizing my videos. I will sign off here, for now, if you read this entire piece and reach here, I hope you see how much of a big deal Facebook is and will continue to be in the future. And can anyone say, Instagram/ Snapchat stories for Whatsapp, but hey, that’s for another post. Hasta la Vista baby.