Facebook is an ever-evolving platform, with new features and consumer usage patterns regularly changing the way marketers operate on the site. This week I caught up with Colin Grieves, General Manager at Experian Marketing Services to see how these changes affect marketers.
Facebook has made a raft of changes to its platform recently. How do these changes impact marketers?
Facebook has really started to experiment with the platform’s capabilities over the past year, from the introduction of clickable hashtags to video ad features sitting on the site itself. Such evolutions mean marketers need to adapt to new ways of reaching their target audience on Facebook, or risk missing out on golden opportunities. Marketers must take advantage of the changes alongside consumer insight, which can help reveal both broad and subtle behavioural habits. This will inform not only their Facebook activities but also those across other channels.
Mobile is increasingly important for Facebook, particularly in terms of revenue – why do you think this is?
From an advertising point of view, we’ve really seen Facebook focus its efforts on mobile – with the news feed becoming the hub of activity. The site claimed 26 million monthly active users and 20 million daily active users on mobile.
These numbers reflect a growing trend in the rise of the Always On Consumer; individuals who are continuously and digitally connecting with brands on the go and across a number of channels. Indeed our own research into the most connected consumer groups demonstrates the need for marketers to target consumers at the right time, on the right device – including mobile.
How important is it for marketers to try and engage the Always On Consumer on social media platforms such as Facebook?
With such large numbers of people accessing Facebook across a range of different devices, marketers must make the most of the data available to ensure that they understand their target audience and can make Facebook pages, posts and campaigns fresh and engaging. This includes data from Facebook itself – such as using information on which posts are most popular to help develop future posts – but it is also important to look at data beyond this platform to assess customer lifetime value, for example.
Video ads within the Facebook platform have become more prevalent this year – why is this?
Online video continues to gain momentum, with Experian Hitwise data showing that the UK Internet population spent 323 million hours watching online video content in February 2013, accounting for 100 million more hours viewing compared to the same period in 2012, an increase of 45 per cent.
Facebook has long targeted an environment where content was almost indistinguishable from advertising and the Facebook video announcement is at least partially driven by that vision. User attention spans are shorter online than when watching TV and it could be argued that Twitter's Vine, with its six second video length, provides a better user experience with short focused clips. However, advertisers will want more time to deliver their message. Facebook has chosen 15 second slots which it believes, while half the length of a traditional TV slot, will best balance the needs of users and advertisers.
With clickable hashtags now available on Facebook what can we expect from advertisers?
Facebook developed a pre-existing targeting capability called 'topics' within its keyword systems, these are rolled up keywords with hashtags like '#football' rather than more specific, hash-less, keywords like 'liverpoolfc'. Enabling real hashtags will improve the quality of the data used for these 'roll-ups'.
This new tool could open the door for a sponsored trends ad product akin to Twitter's, although that will depend on how visible the eventual trend functionality is within the system. If it's on the home page it will have enough visibility and would justify consideration of a new ad product.
How can advertisers make use of data along with the Facebook changes?
It is an often repeated adage that the customer is king in retail, and the same should apply to marketing.
Facebook is no exception to this rule, as marketers can reach people on a personal level meaning that a customer centric approach is all the more important. Marketers should take advantage of new technologies rolled out by Facebook, as well as consumer insight and data released by the company, which can help reveal both broad and subtle behavioural habits to help inform not only their Facebook activities but also those across other channels.
All too often, the proliferation of channels equals a siloed marketing environment. To make the most out of Facebook, marketers must ensure that they are sharing information about campaigns on other channels to inform activity on the social network. For example Experian’s platform can reach out to their clients’ audience not only via email, but also continue the conversation with their customers via custom audiences on Facebook, thus ensuring a consistent message across both channels. Effective data linkage has the potential to create a highly targeted and impactful campaign which utilises all the latest technologies to reach today’s connected consumer.
By Jonathan Davies, Editor of the Digital Marketing Magazine.
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