Two weeks back I met a young entrepreneur who also happens to be the owner of an ecommerce portal in the health and fitness space. His portal largely sells health products/plans to users (mildly put, the ones with a little too much fat on them). I have been tracing his business ever since the launch which was about 6 months ago. While the Facebook page of the portal has gained some followers and the portal has exponentially grown in terms of users, the business owner had a common problem on hand. While sampling a few profiles of followers on his Facebook page, he was not happy with the user profiles following his page. That is, most followers were not a part of his target audience, and he was susceptible of them ever being paid users on the site, or adding any value to the Facebook page, apart from numbers.
Quite honestly, he was not the first one to share that problem. And quite honestly, it is not a unique problem. What I have concluded is that Facebook business page owners would have to accept that there would be large quantity followers who may never become consumers of their products in their entire lifetime. Worse, they may not even spread a good word about the product. That may be a shocker for quite a few brand managers in our country where the success of Facebook marketing is invariably defined by the number of likes, comments and shares. Well, there’s a lot concealed behind the stats too. And that is the most important. Agreed, it is almost impossible to profile users on your business page, neither a brand will change its communication for an altered audience. In essence, the brand communication has to remain the same.
Targeted advertising, overrated and not frequently upgraded, may convince the advertiser that he will capture target audience suited for the brand. But that’s not true. While brands need to target on Facebook, they should, rather must, know that the ads will also invite audiences out of their radar. Let’s have a look at an interesting example. Audi India has 680,000-odd fans, while Audi India sells some 2600 cars in a year. The percentage of users that will never buy an Audi is anybody’s guess! But I have a feeling that Audi knows that. They know they are not speaking to everyone.
The non-statistical side of Facebook and other social networking sites is also its uncertain side. Somewhere down the line, brand owners (especially tight-budgeted SMEs) will notice this more microscopically. I hope Facebook takes a lead and breaks open a solution. Amen.