Marketing Report: Analyzing Facebook's Social Media Strategies

This report provides an in-depth analysis of Facebook's social media marketing strategies. It begins by defining social media marketing and highlighting Facebook's role as a pioneer in the field, emphasizing its large user base and revenue generation through personalized ads. The report then explores aspects where Facebook excels, such as its effective business pages, which facilitate direct communication with target audiences and provide features like Facebook Insights. It also highlights the cost-effectiveness of Facebook's marketing compared to traditional methods, discussing features like CPM and the ability to incorporate various marketing elements. However, the report also addresses criticisms, particularly concerning data mining and privacy issues, citing the Cambridge Analytica scandal as an example. Finally, the report concludes with recommendations for Facebook to improve data security, enhance user privacy, and address potential criticisms to strengthen its social media marketing initiatives.

Running head: SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Name of the student:
Student ID:
Date:
Course:
Assessment 2:
Tutor:

1SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Table of Contents
1. Introduction.........................................................................................................................3
2. The chosen company..........................................................................................................3
2.1 One aspect the company excels at....................................................................................4
2.2 Another aspect the company excels at.............................................................................5
2.3 One aspect that the company is criticised for...................................................................6
3. Conclusion & Recommendations.......................................................................................7

2SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
1. Introduction
Social media marketing refers to the activities that are used to gain attention or traffic
through the social media platforms such as Twitter, Snapchat and Facebook. It is a powerful
way to achieve a company’s branding and marketing goals by analysing the way customers
engage with different elements of the internet like posting updates on images (Shaikh et al.
2016).
In the following report, the chosen industry has been taken as Social Media Marketing.
The hosen company within the industry has been taken as Facebook. The aspects that
Facebook is good at has been mentioned in the discussion part of the report. One aspect that
the company is criticized for has also been mentioned in the following report. To address
those issues, suitable recommendations have been provided in the report conclusively.
2. The chosen company
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and some Harvard University colleagues
in 2004. The company is based on social networking and is one of the pioneers of social
media marketing. It has more than 2 billion active users and collects user information to
provide optimum services (Stelzner 2014). The company collects revenue from the
personalized ads it provides to prospective customers. The company has several competitive
features such as co-workers and classmates search engine, fan pages, interactive chat, photo
album management, friend list management and customized security, privacy and profile.
The developer network of Facebook provides enhanced functionalities through its
applications. Advanced web integration and cross platform connectivity is enabled through a
login authentication service of the company known as Facebook Connect (Armstrong et al.

3SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
2015). It allows other business to maintain their pages and allows them to use the platform as
a medium for social media marketing.
2.1 One aspect the company excels at
Figure 1: A business page of a steakhouse in Facebook
(Source: Armstrong et al. 2015)
Facebook allows other prospective businesses to use its site effectively by allowing
them to create business pages. Unlike the other competitors in the market, Facebook excels at
providing optimum services with its business pages. For example, the company allows other
businesses to contact with their target audiences directly through the platform. The business
page by Facebook allows the other consumes to earn more about the business and possibly
acquire services from them. The page has other advanced features such as Facebook Insights
which collects information from users that can be used for later interactions (Turhan 2013).
The platform provides the businesses with a medium for conducting humanized
communication. One on one conversation, non-business interactions and personal tidbits are

4SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
used more and more nowadays for marketing purposes. The platform allows businesses to
attach a personality and face to the brand. It is search engine optimized and provides the
business with an opportunity to showcase their services along with their potential
competitors. Moreover, the business pages provided by the platform allows the business to
reach a huge number of audience in a limited period of time and increase its online
awareness.
2.2 Another aspect the company excels at
Conducting social media marketing through Facebook is also cheaper than traditional
marketing methods. The social media marketing conducted by Facebook is much effective
than traditional marketing as it allows a two way communication between the consumer and
the businesses and allows promotion of new services and products. CPM is a feature in
Facebook that is used an advertising metric. CPM or Cost per thousand impressions shows
the amount of money needed to spend for reaching a thousand followers (Facebook's data
scandal could get even worse - money.cnn.com. 2018). As the main motive of marketing is
to reach as much customers possible, Facebook excels in this aspect as it allows exposure to
1000s of followers for less than $4. Moreover, the traditional forms of marketing can be
incorporated in the social media marketing elements like webinars, live podcasts of webinars,
publishing articles and video commercials (Vinerean et al. 2013). It allows the business to
provide feedback, answer queries and communicate with customers in the cheapest way
possible. This is also proven by the fact that in traditional marketing there are certain hidden
costs that are not taken into account such as for direct mail promotion, the mailing and
printing costs are not always considered. For TV and ad commercials, the price of
commercials increase during the peak hours (Tuten and Solomon 2017). Also, the pricing of
billboards depend on the location and traffic around the area. But for social media platforms

5SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
like Facebook, this is not a concern as the prices remain stable and the cost analysis can be
done easily with this method
Figure 2: CPM Impressions of marketing methods
(Source: Turhan 2013)
2.3 One aspect that the company is criticised for
Despite the advantages provided by Facebook in social media marketing, it is widely
criticized for a number of reasons. One of the criticism aspects is data mining. It is the
method by which patterns are analysed form large datasets like database systems, statistics
and machine learning data. The method involves intelligent analysis to detect data patterns.
Although Facebook acknowledges that they have installed various number of security
protections to prevent malware and phishing, recently the company got into a massive data
privacy issue when another company managed to steal millions of customer data from the
platform (CNNPolitics 2018). Cambridge Analytica managed to obtain user data from a quiz
app known as myPersonality and used it for political propaganda that affected millions of
people. Facebook argued that it uses the analytics to provide customized experiences to users

6SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
and often provides them with better prospects. But the misuse of private data can have long
lasting consequences that even Facebook could not deny (Facebook-Cambridge Analytica: A
timeline of the data 2018). The criticism against the company escalated when Facebook
agreed that the company also targets non users with targeted ads which they have not agreed
before the data scandal issue (Mark Zuckerberg apologizes for Facebook data scandal 2018).
The data collection method of Facebook is highly debatable and the consequences of the
actions are still being researched as the issue is relatively new.
3. Conclusion & Recommendations
To conclude the report, it can be stated that social media marketing has a lot of
advantages that needs to be analysed by prospective companies before using this platform as
the prime marketing tool. Facebook is one of the pioneers of social media marketing and its
marketing initiatives are highly unrivalled due to its user data gathering methodologies. But
with the dawn of the information age and massive security breaches in the last couple of
years, nothing can be termed as 100% secure. Privacy of data is a choice that needs to be
assessed by Facebook conclusively.
Facebook needs to investigate all the web applications that are currently running on
the platform to reduce data access. They need to audit these apps which shows malicious
intents. To prevent data breach, Facebook needs to restrict login data and switch off access to
unused apps. They need to comply with the rules and policies that are set by GDPR. They
need to communicate with the users properly whether or not the users are willing to share
their private data for better experiences. Facebook needs to prevent random applications from
gaining access to customer pages by creating better firewall protection between third party
applications.

7SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
These recommendations need to be followed by Facebook carefully to prevent such
criticisms in the near future and enhance the attributes of social media marketing.

8SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
References
Armstrong, G., Kotler, P., Harker, M. and Brennan, R., 2015. Marketing: an introduction.
Pearson Education.
CNNPolitics, 2018. [online] Available at:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/20/politics/facebook-cambridge-analytica-key-players/
index.html [Accessed 19 May 2018].
Facebook-Cambridge Analytica: A timeline of the data ...., 2018. [online] Available at:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/facebook-cambridge-analytica-a-timeline-of-the-data-
hijacking-scandal.html [Accessed 19 May 2018].
Facebook's data scandal could get even worse - money.cnn.com. 2018. [online] Available at:
http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/20/technology/facebook-data-scandal-deepens/index.html
[Accessed 19 May 2018].
Mark Zuckerberg apologizes for Facebook data scandal ..., 2018. [online] Available at:
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2018/03/21/facebook-ceo-zuckerberg-breaks-silence-on-data-
scandal-dont-deserve-to-serve-without-security.html [Accessed 19 May 2018].
Shaikh, N., Siddiqui, M.E., Vasatkar, K., Jagtap, Y. and Sankpal, L.J., 2016. Social media
marketing. International Research Journal of Engineering and Technology, 3(6), pp.870-872.
Stelzner, M., 2014. 2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Report. Social media examiner,
pp.1-52.
Turhan, A., 2013. Social Media Marketing.
Tuten, T.L. and Solomon, M.R., 2017. Social media marketing. Sage.

9SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Vinerean, S., Cetina, I., Dumitrescu, L. and Tichindelean, M., 2013. The effects of social
media marketing on online consumer behavior. International Journal of Business and
Management, 8(14), p.66.