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With 2.9 billion monthly active users, Facebook is still the most widely used social media platform worldwide. For brands whose target audience is over 30, Facebook is still an extremely relevant platform to reach and engage customers. Let's take a look at Facebook marketing, demographics, advertising, best practices and insights about how brands can best use Facebook to reach their target audiences.
Around 1.91 billion people access Facebook every day through the main Facebook app, Facebook Messenger or the Facebook website. According to an October 2022 report from Statista, Facebook users between 25 to 34 years of age make up the social network's largest audience (23.6%) in the United States, with an equal gender split. Although Facebook initially attracted younger users, today Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok have become the new hangouts for teenagers. In order to retain a hold on other age groups, Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, WhatsApp in 2014 for $16 billion and Oculus for $2 billion in 2014.
Lane Gregory, CEO and founder of CrowdShare, a social media branding platform provider, told CMSWire that although it's no secret that Facebook's user base is a little older, this crowd is also a demographic with the most disposable income. “Facebook and Instagram users typically purchase higher ticket items like homes, cars and vacations, while users of TikTok and Snapchat are more interested in lifestyle brands. Facebook is the top dog in the market,” said Gregory. “However, brands need to focus on building fandom online. They need to focus on building digital street teams through their employees, friends, family, customers and even small market influencers so they can have an effective digital presence.”
Related Article: How Facebook's Thinking About Its War With TikTok
Brands that already have a Facebook business page are able to gain demographic insights about their audience using Facebook’s Audience Insights tool. It provides details about two groups of people: people connected to the brand’s Page and people on Facebook. These insights enable brands to create content that resonates and allows them to find more people similar to those in their current audience.
Brands are able to filter their audience based on the following:
By using the filters, a business could find people who are female, between the ages of 25 and 35, single, college educated, in IT and Technical services, and who have “liked” Shopify. This enables brands to locate and market to a very narrow niche audience.
Silvana Massolo, CEO and strategy director at The Bloom Agency, a social media marketing agency, told CMSWire that Facebook offers incredible targeting options and allows brands to run campaigns at one of the lowest costs per click and cost per thousand impressions. “Facebook will automatically show your ads to people who are most likely to find your ads relevant,” said Massolo. “You can further target your ad delivery with three audience selection tools: core audiences, custom audiences and lookalike audiences."
Massolo explained that core audiences define an audience based on age, interests, geography, etc., custom audiences get back in touch with people who have engaged with your business and lookalike audiences reach new people whose interests are similar to those of your best customers. Along with paid media, Massolo suggested that ecommerce brands create and grow a Facebook group where their audience can find common interests to stay entertained and engaged, and that brands should emphasize how they add value to their customers’ lives as opposed to just shilling products.
“Know your target audience, be honest with yourself, set realistic goals, and invest in a professional shoot of your products,” said Massolo. “Remember that people are visual creatures; photos or videos will be the selling point and make sure you put your best foot forward to have a healthy ROI on your Facebook media investments.”
Related Article: Deciding on the Best Social Media Platforms for Customer Connection
Facebook provides brands with many different types of ad formats, so businesses are able to select the type of ad that is the most appropriate for their goals.
Ian McCue, co-founder, CEO at Preflect, an AI-powered AdTech platform provider, told CMSWire that there are three things that brands need to know about Facebook marketing:
Organic discovery is limited. Meta wants businesses to prioritize paid ads, so don't expect to go viral like you can on TikTok.
Focus on sharing. People frequently tag their friends on posts/ads, or send posts to their friends. Use your followers to earn more followers!
Use paid promotion to build your audience. Once someone follows your brand, you'll get perpetual organic reach. Paid ads are still a great way to build your following.
As with marketing on any social medium, Facebook is unique and comes with its own set of challenges. McCue said that as a business, the challenges he’s faced with Facebook Ads include:
Attribution. “We've found it incredibly difficult to accurately attribute conversions to ads, and to know which ad earned which conversion since Apple's iOS 14.5 updates. In Meta Ads Manager, conversion data quality is poor, especially for low-volume conversion events. Even worse, Meta's Aggregated Event Measurement lags up to 72 hours, forcing us to make uninformed decisions while we wait for data.”
Overhead costs. “Managing ads on Meta can be a full-time job. Good advertising agencies come with expensive retainers, presenting a high-cost hurdle to overcome every month.”
Conversion optimization. “It’s difficult to optimize the onsite experience for conversions. While Meta enables us to test multiple ad texts, they don't let us natively test multiple landing pages, forcing us to use third-party tools.”
McCue said that he’s been able to solve those challenges by using external (non-Meta) tracking technology to obtain high-resolution data in real-time, which assists him in making informed decisions. Additionally, he uses external landing page routing to test multiple landing pages and send shoppers to the highest-converting page.
Related Article: 4 Ways Technology Is Influencing Social Media
Facebook offers brands multiple ways to reach and engage with a huge audience, and also provides fine-tuning options that allow brands to market to very narrow, vertical audience segments.
By using the most appropriate ads for their goals, as well as creating compelling and engaging content, brands are able to retain loyal customers and gain new ones in the process.
For nearly two decades CMSWire, produced by Simpler Media Group, has been the world's leading community of customer experience professionals.
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Today the CMSWire community consists of over 5 million influential customer experience, digital experience and customer service leaders, the majority of whom are based in North America and employed by medium to large organizations. Our sister community, Reworked gathers the world's leading employee experience and digital workplace professionals.
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For nearly two decades CMSWire, produced by Simpler Media Group, has been the world's leading community of customer experience professionals.
.
Today the CMSWire community consists of over 5 million influential customer experience, digital experience and customer service leaders, the majority of whom are based in North America and employed by medium to large organizations. Our sister community, Reworked gathers the world's leading employee experience and digital workplace professionals.