Arguably the biggest social media platform, Facebook has 2.5 Billion visitors every month meaning it would seem like the perfect place to promote any sort of business. The site allows you to connect easily with potential clients using either targeted groups or via a business Facebook page. Facebook is however driven by targeted adverts which means its hard to get a large following without paying Facebook to target potential clients with your page. That being said however on average the amount of likes a Facebook page gets only goes up by roughly 0.13% each month and in this includes businesses that pay Facebook to promote their page so it doesn't really seem like it is worth paying for. I then found out that an average Facebook user only clicks on 11 adverts a month so this could be the reason for the slow increase on page likes the site doesn't seem to do enough to actually get their adverts to the audiences they're targeted at.
Aside from promoting business pages though Facebook also has a TV section which is where anyone can upload their content much like you tube. Some company's are actually taking money away from other places like TV advertising and putting it into Facebook as Facebook reaches its largest audience through its TV section with over 100 Million hours of video content being watched on Facebook every single day. "We've shifted advertising dollars from TV to Facebook video, as it's the only way we can get perfect targeting and a proven return on investment. We may be early adopters of what will be the new standard." (Macaluso, S). The quote above is from a director of marketing who works closely with a musician called Joe Bonamassa who has had high levels of success promoting his music through Facebook.
As someone who loves making music videos and making music videos is a big part of what my company Iris studios does this was the perfect case study to find. Joe is an American Blue-Rock guitarist and in the past 13 years he has released 16 solo albums. Joe has amassed a large following on Facebook with his page having over 3 Million likes and found a lot of success using video ads and putting them on Facebook TV to promote his music. The goal of Joe's marketing team was to increase the amount of people signed up to his digital newsletter as well as promoting and ultimately increasing sales of his album different shades of blue that was released in 2014. Before the release of the album between August-December 2014 Joes marketing team J & R adventures managed to achieve a 3.6% return on ad spend from Facebook ads, 2.4 Million total video view across all Facebook video advertisements, 100,000 newsletter sign ups and number 8 position on the Billboard top 200 charts. His marketing managed to do that in eight months now I may not have a marketing team but it does show that if you really put your mind to it and use Facebook's TV section effectively you can increase a pages following massively in a short space of time.
In light of researching and finding out about Joes successes I decided to take a lot at his page and his videos and they are of course high quality and have loads of views but they don't really do anything particularly special or unique. The only I could find was highlighting words like FREE when he occasionally gives demos and things away to entice people in but that is nothing that hasn't been done before. This proved to me that it must be just that Facebook's promotion of video content is really effective. I then went and looked at his page and as I had expected he has kept things simple just using a high quality sample video as the pages cover video and a simple picture of him during a concert as the pages main picture. Although Joe is a musician the ways of promoting both our companies work are effectively the same and this is how my Facebook page looks compared to his.
In conclusion,
Facebook promotion
Positives:
Effective video promotion via Facebook TV
Video promotion can increase a businesses following quickly
Negatives:
Targeted Ads aren't always as effective as they could be
Generally bad at promoting Facebook pages
Bibliography:
Entertainment and media (2020). Available at: https://www.facebook.com/business/industries/entertainment (Accessed: 28 April 2020).
33 Facebook Stats Marketers That Matter to Marketers in 2020, Hootsuite Social Media Management. Available at: https://blog.hootsuite.com/facebook-statistics/#business (Accessed: 28 April 2020).
Joe Bonamassa (2020). Available at: https://www.facebook.com/business/success/joe-bonamassa (Accessed: 28 April 2020).
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