Facebook is New Platform that Requires New Advertising Strategies

Paul Adams, who is the Global Brand Experience Manager at Facebook, gave a talk yesterday to marketer professionals at the Federated Media's Signal conference in San Francisco. An article from TechCrunch reported on the interesting responses, comments, insights, and advice Adams gave to the marketers who were in attendance.

Many professionals in SEO and social media marketing feel frustrated by the fact that there is not enough "online real estate" set aside on the social networking site for them to display their advertisements to the millions of Facebook users around the world. Adams, however, made the claim that marketers simply don’t fully understand the platform and how it exactly works when it comes to promoting a brand or company and its products and services on it.

Adams asserted that Facebook is primarily all about relationships, and it is this power to socially connect with people that marketers must harness to create and manage successful Facebook advertising campaigns. They must build relationships with users on a grassroots level through their companies' Facebook Pages, placing particular emphasis on establishing personal connections.

These types of interactions produce a variety of social media benefits: users who like the company trust it even more, while new users are attracted to liking the company too when they witness the high level of interactivity. Ultimately, the formation of a strong Facebook community around a brand or company's Facebook Page ends up being a wonderful avenue and strategy for advertising and marketing.

The article on TechCrunch goes on to make a particularly interesting point: the problem arising with social media marketing is that social media presents a completely new avenue of communication between people and companies. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and other social networking sites possess new rules of engagement between people that marketers must seek to understand and master if they want to manage successful advertising campaigns through these channels.

Just throwing ads into the view of people is how advertising on television has always worked best. The same cannot be said for social media, although that tactic does work to a certain extent. Companies must start adapting their marketing techniques to the new technologies.