It’s sort of interesting how businesses have been treating social media in the past few years.
We all know that social media is a new phenomenon. Any of us, even those just reaching the age to become young career professionals, have seen social media develop over the last 20 or so years. Anyone older than that has seen the days when we didn’t have social media at all, and it had a negligible effect on business society.
That’s not the case anymore, and you actually have a fairly monolithic and centralized social media environment. Facebook is far and away the dominant platform that gets an enormous share of all marketing materials for business in any industry or sector.
That creates some opportunities, but also some major problems. Let’s talk a little bit about that in detail.
Facebook Opportunity
Even up to a few years ago, people were heralding the unique ability of Facebook to boost business.
That’s still the case, particularly with Facebook pixel marketing strategies and other behind-the-scenes work, for example, developers work on the Facebook open graph and specialized business pages with features to reach consumers.
But then there is that algorithm – while the algorithm can deliver targeted business outcomes, it’s also been under scrutiny by whistleblowers, legislators, the general public, and a range of other parties, as perhaps a little too dominant, perhaps a little two monolithic.
Some people see antitrust behavior coming down the pike and want to pivot accordingly.
The Promise of Multichannel Diversification
Smart business people know not to put all of their eggs in one basket. The same should be true with social media marketing.
As the Facebook castle looks to be shaking rather violently, businesses should augment a Facebook channel with other social media and digital marketing channels, to have a good all-around web presence.
People talking about multichannel marketing often talk about making your branding consistent across all of these channels – but you can’t do that if you don’t have the channels, to begin with.
That means businesses have to start to look at their existing strategies, refine and fine-tune them, and brainstorm how to reach people in this part of the 21st century. Facebook will probably not be the dominant model forever.
Turn to Ready Business Systems for excellent IT services and consulting in the range of social media marketing and other operations.
