Facebook Social Media

Introduction

The combination of social media and eMarketing has changed the face of user engagement; using online and cross-media profiling has allowed marketers to introduce levels of immediacy and relevance far beyond demographics and choice of broadband media. When browsing social media websites, the ads that appear on your screen are adapted to an online user profile that is kept by the website. This technique generates room for personalized advertisement, enabling companies to easily reach their target customer. This innovative approach changes traditional approaches for eMarketers. The question arises: is the traditional B2C model for marketing still applicable to modern day advertising? How do social media impact the opportunity for delivery of personalized messaging and advertisements? This paper investigates the role the largest social media platform, Facebook, in online advertisement and in what way social media have changed eMarketing.

Successful sharing on Facebook

Facebook’s influence on people is enormous. Examples are the recently released video named ‘KONY 2012’. Before this video came out, nobody knew who he was. Within a week after its release the video was shared 70 million times (Jarboe, 2012).

President Obama has been using Facebook since the beginning of his campaign. He uses Facebook to communicate with the American people. This allows him to come closer to his followers, share his ideas and gain support for them (Qualman, 2009. From a business perspective, there are a large number of companies who advertise on Facebook to gain more customer value and brand awareness. An example of a commercial industry that promotes its projects via Facebook is the videogame industry. Via videos of their upcoming projects they spread awareness and gain potential customer interest. This awareness grows virally and exponentially, because of the people sharing the video online.

Online customer profiling to enable targeted advertisement

As new technologies are being created everyday, new opportunities for companies and their markets rise. Consumers have embraced these new technologies, for example the smartphone trend. In this digital age, people are online anywhere, anytime. The modern trend is people sharing their activities and thoughts online via social media. If Facebook had been a country, it would have a population of 854 million people (www.facebook.com). This means that the social platform gives instant access to millions of potential customers about whom valuable marketing information is available and becomes richer with every mouse click. Companies now use social media to target their customers, via the online profile the social media website keeps. This profile can consist of implicit data, activity tracking information, peer community, demographics, predictive analytics and very explicit information