Beyond Marketing

Behind much of the chatter about Facebook is one simple idea: marketing. It is also something I like to call "the Facebook Problem."

The saturation of advertising messages on Facebook has users complaining, marketers wonder and the network profiting. What it all means.

A few months ago, I published a post here with my prediction that Facebook would decline in popularity, and that it would do so, in part, because it doesn’t put users first. Some disagreed with my assertion that Facebook as a destination would become a thing of the past. Here’s why I’m right.

When you’re the size of Facebook, the fall is a long one, so Facebook won’t disappear in the next year. The network is likely to experience a significant drop within the next five years, though. (We may even be seeing the first signs in Facebook’s recent decline in traffic and lower use among kids.) Why? Because Facebook doesn’t put its customers first, it is highly vulnerable to a new, disruptive technology.

Here are two methods you can use to put a numerical value on your social media efforts. Social media marketers everywhere, rejoice!

Social advertising has increasingly becoming part of marketing campaigns. Whether you consider yourself B2B or B2C, you are advertising to people and the targeting options available in social ads allow you to tailor your message to a particular segment of your audience. Both Facebook and LinkedInads allow you to reach an audience that is hard to pinpoint in search and regular display campaigns.

For B2B Brands, Facebook Delivers Traffic, Twitter Delivers Leads [STUDY]

Facebook’s new Graph Search feature has marketers scrambling to figure out what it means. It means very little if you have a solid content strategy in place, argues communications expert Shel Holtz...

Read about the biggest social media marketing updates from 2012.