You can admit it – you find yourself being super annoyed with the fact that any time you look up a product or service online, you receive direct ads within Facebook or Instagram by items in that category. You may even be guilty of ordering some of those random products (customized illustrated book for Father’s Day, moon diffuser lamp, super absorbent hair towel? Oh wait, those were some of my random orders.) Regardless, you probably get a good laugh at some of the ads sent your way, and some are not surprisingly way off base.
Facebook hasn’t built itself into a billion-dollar company by charging the consumer a subscription fee. Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth is estimated at more than $84B by Forbes. They have built this company in many strategic ways including charging for advertising (their primary source of revenue) and offering highly targeted data analytics so you can reach a broad audience on a fairly modest budget. As a company, you can also review your ads’ reach and engagement as well as modify your campaigns while they are ongoing.
As of May 2020, Facebook has launched Facebook Shops, where businesses can now turn their Facebook and Instagram stories into online shops. According to Producthunt, “The aim is to help new shop owners and small businesses to leverage their existing audiences to compete with Amazon.” Facebook also partnered with Shopify to include their capabilities of shipping, fulfillment, and inventory management. The initial set up of Facebook Shops is free, and it may live within the activity page or a “shop” page. They will eventually integrate in to Whatsapp, and be ready for consumers to make purchases within chats.
Facebook has integrated into our daily lives in many ways. Examples include:
- Shutterfly to where we post and share our photos
- MeetUp.com to being in individual groups by interest
- Craigslist to Facebook Marketplace
- Birthday Reminder to Friends’ Birthdays Notification
- Eventbrite (still popular for tickets) to Facebook Events
- Donation pages are now able collect our money through Facebook Pay
- Games, Movies, Business Pages, Live Promos, Crisis Response Information
- There’s a Jobs Tab where you can peruse job postings, and a Town Hall tab to follow your local officials
It does appear in the last year they have been making strides to help out small businesses and deliver more localized content. This could be perceived as a group of business owners that receives less attention but offers lots of possibility, and make up a really large part of overall business in the U.S. Per fundera,“There are 30.2 million small businesses in this country.”
“We don’t have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how well we do it?”
Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business
