A Student's View: Facebook

By Erica Wenham, Friday 12 October 2012.

The use of other social media platforms in a PR campaign can act as an audience facilitator. We are exposed to approximately 3,000+ marketing, advertising, and PR methods daily. Therefore, it is extremely important to ensure the brand’s message gets noticed. “Competing messages can come from the constant buzz from social media” (Weinreich, 2011, p.37).

Social media helps to find and engage with customers on a more personal level, identify influencers, gain advocates, amplify key messages and develop and improve the quality of customer relations to increase satisfaction and brand loyalty (Brown, 2010). A brand’s reputation can also be enhanced through websites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as they can ensure relationships with their consumers are managed well in a quick, effective way.

Since Facebook launched in 2004, the social network has acquired over 800 million members and is still continuing to grow at rapid speed, making them the most popular social networking website in the world. Unlike some other online platforms, Facebook’s demographic include users of all ages and interests. There are many key benefits of using Facebook as an effective marketing tool for online retailers and other organisations.

A Facebook fan-page is essentially a free method of effective advertising for a company and can help to build brand credibility (in other words, building a stronger public image for target audiences). Unlike Twitter (which limits its posts to only 140 characters per tweet), Facebook allows it’s fan pages to share as much info as they want, easily posting useful information, pictures, video/sound content etc.

As a result, the brand’s message has been spread across various markets just about Facebook is also mobile so users can keep up with an organisation’s posts, announcements, offers and more whilst “on-the-go”.

They can then in turn recommend the retailer to friends, thus creating more exposure for the brand. Effective social media marketing’s main benefit is that its exposure is much greater than with traditional SEO-based marketing alone.