6 minute read
“Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room”- famous quote of Jeff Bezos, founder, chairman [&] CEO of Amazon. Indeed, nowadays, when the room is public – mostly a social media based, brand can not only participate in but also start a conversation. However, social media is not only the brand-builder. Today, social media is your sales platform. Facebook, along with other social media, turns itself into money-makers allowing users to make a purchase straight from the application. Here you will find the heads-up for innovations from Facebook and its business implementation.
Social
comes first
First of all, let’s not forget that social media must be social. The potential clients are settled online and eager to interact with brands. However, the variety of social platforms can make one dizzy. Thanks to yearly 2015 Social Media Marketing Industry research we can get the insight of how marketers use the social media to grow their business. Around 92 percent of the surveyed marketers reveal that social media is a vital tool for their businesses. Moreover, 90 percent said that social media increases their exposure, whereas 69 percent appreciate it for its ability to develop loyal fans.
Leader of
the online
communication
It comes as no surprise that Facebook, which in the first quarter of 2016 has reached 1.44 billion monthly active users, is the choice number one for marketers. Besides well-known outstanding users statistics, Facebook has reinvented itself from social network to well-adjusted sales tool. Companies share on their pages the information about products and services, make promotions, share videos and images complimenting their brands. What is more, Facebook is offering the activity boxes like “Buy it now” and “Visit the website”. There are numerous entrepreneurs who use Facebook company page as the only platform for their company. It is easy to leave the comment and improve customer service just using the company page. Furthermore, as the report shows, marketers are actively using paid Facebook ads, as they are insensibly integrated into the users’ newsfeed.
Artificial intelligence
in the messenger app
Mark Zuckerberg does not stop on the achieved. Facebook continue to develop aiming to become not only the social network but also the irreplaceable tool of everyone lives. What comes after or before the communication? Right, shopping. People shop a lot and their habits are going online from fashion retail to daily grocery. In nearest future, there will be a service to make payments through Facebook, but time for it has yet to come. For now, Facebook CEO has announced launching the tool, which will be beneficial for both customers and businesses: Message bots.
Taking into account that Facebook messenger is the one of the most popular worldwide apps and text message is the most used smartphone feature, Facebook found the way to implement those two characteristics in one perfect for business. The message bot will use artificial intelligence to ease the communication with companies and their sales and customer services. Now users will be able to chat with the brand just like they do it with their friends. However, this time, the friend on the other side of the screen will never be busy. Message bots will provide with a quick reply without taking too much attention or requiring you to install a new app. And here we are talking about numbers of services including shopping, booking airline tickets and even reading the news.
The most popular messenger WeChat in China has already successfully established the link between users and businesses. 600 million people already use WeChat every month to hail taxis, book doctor’s appointments and pay utility bills.
Birds of feather
flock together
or the importance of
right targeting
Besides the Message bot, marketers actively use the paid services offered by social platforms. While, with no doubt, content plays the major role in the ad, defining the right target audience for the ad is intensively substantial. Let’s talk about homophily theory or why defining the target audience is important. The homophily theory has[nbsp]been described by Plato claiming that “similarity begets friendship” and his student and friend Aristotle that people “love those who are like themselves”. Since their time not much has changed. People tend to typify “people like us”. Globalisation and the Internet connection have erased the borders. As has been described in “Born to be global“, we categorise ourselves differently. National identity and racial belonging play less role in the choice of networking. The personal characteristics and interests take the major role in determining the social circle.
Computer scientists like Jennifer Golbeck learned how to operate and analyse the data gathered on social media and found the way to determine peoples’ political preferences, race, age, life satisfaction, a certain period of life, marital status and other characteristics based on the likes on Facebook. In her[nbsp]talk on Ted, Jennifer Golbeck has shown the magnificent way the facebook likes of a picture of curly fries identified highly intelligent people. On the first sight, or who are we kidding, from any point of view, the Curly fries should not tell us about the intelligence level of a human. We must not forget that correlation does not mean causation. Liking Curly Fries does not make a human highly intelligent. Following the homophily theory, people create an own social circle, they are connected to each other and follow each others posts and likes. It takes one of them to like the image, so other “birds” will notice it and perform the same action. That is how the Curly Fries image becomes to identify the social circle. To be fair, any image could do it.
Choosing the right target audience is important for business. Hitting straight in the middle of the circle of your potential clients and they will spread the word for “people like us”. Implementing the predictive analysis and what is trendily called Big Data can help businesses to determine the best way of “attacking” potential customers.
