Are Digital Marketing Activities On Facebook Really Essential?

Currently, the digital marketing market is filled with vacancies for social media managers, as new companies are launched to manage marketing campaigns on social networking websites like Facebook. Many digital marketing companies are creating special social media divisions, while clients with big digital marketing budgets are hiring experts to help them gain a portion of the social media real estate. These so-called experts have spun various digital marketing theories about how Facebook pages can be used to attract potential customers, and improve revenues.

However, is Facebook really as great as most digital marketing pundits would have us believe? Well, if you conduct a careful analysis, you'll see that social media marketing offers very little returns on the amount of funds invested. This is because:

. A majority of people on Facebook are using it simply as a means to communicate with their friends, colleagues and family members. The website has become popular because it is easy to use, and does not require visitors to remember email addresses or birthdays of their contacts.

. The engagement ratio of fans of most business pages is less than one percent. For example, let's take a look at the Facebook page of Starbucks, the international coffee and coffeehouse chain. The page boasts of more than 20 million fans, with about 1000 fans communicating with it daily. This gives us a daily engagement ratio of less than 0.005 percent. Also, most messages posted, usually have very few responses.

. It is difficult to keep users engaged on Facebook business pages with massive amounts of fans. For instance, on the Britney Spears fan page which has more than 9,40,000 fans, all messages posted by Britney gets thousands of responses and 'likes'. Most visitors say they love Britney, or ask others to add them as friends. These comments are usually forgotten the next day, and can in no way be considered useful from a digital marketing perspective.

. The large numbers of Facebook fan pages strongly compete for user attention, making it difficult for users to engage with each of their 'liked' pages on a regular basis. Just like visiting a flea market; visitors may enjoy shopping there occasionally, but would never like to live there forever.

However, as Facebook has millions of people signing-in daily, digital marketing professionals cannot afford to totally ignore its benefits. Compared to managing a business page, a better way to conduct digital marketing activities on Facebook would be to purchase advertising. Paid advertisements will ensure that you won't have to worry about page management issues, while your ads would send interested customers straight to a specified landing page, capturing leads and generating sales.

Qudos Digital is a leading digital marketing agency and can be contacted on 020 8891 2077 or info@qudosdigital.co.uk.

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