By Jenny Wagler
As parts of Vancouver’s advertising industry continue to struggle in the wake of the economic downturn and with recent news that heavyweight TBWA Vancouver has filed for creditor protection, companies are continuing to find new opportunities with Facebook marketing.
In late March, Vancouver’s marketing community came out in force to hear Facebook Canada senior director Alfredo Tan’s “Is Facebook the elephant at your company?” presentation at an event hosted by Sales and Marketing Executives International.
In his talk, Tan called Canada “one of the most Facebook-obsessed nations on the planet.” He pointed out that 65% of the nation logs onto Facebook every day, and that Canadians spend 479 minutes a month on Facebook compared with a global average of 273 minutes.
Tan added that Canadian Facebook users have an average of 190 “friends,” versus an international average of 130. He provided insights into how companies can market themselves and raise their profile through Facebook.
He noted that by building up its following of company fans – where Facebook users click to “like” the company – its messages can reach, not only its immediate fans, but each of their fans’ networks.
As an example, Tan pointed out that Tim Hortons (TSX:THI, NYSE:THI) won’t reach just its 1.3 million company fans through Facebook posts and status updates. Assuming each has the national average of 190 friends, the company would instead reach closer to 250 million people.
“If we believe that word-of-mouth marketing is the most powerful mechanism for communicating and getting people to buy things,” said Tan, “we can now do it in a way we couldn’t before because we have the people and the scale side of it.”
Tan also spoke about Facebook Deals, the geolocation marketing function the company launched in late January.
He said companies using it can lure customers into their stores by offering promotions that require the customer to check in on a smartphone. That, in turn, alerts a customer’s network of Facebook friends to the deal and generates free marketing for the company.
Tan added that, by mining data that it collects from its users, Facebook can target ads to potential customers based on location, sex, interests, employer, education level and other variables.
Chris Breikss, president of Vancouver digital marketing company 6S Marketing Inc., said that Facebook marketing has moved from being a possible new communication tool for businesses to “an essential part of the marketing mix.”
“We don’t ask, ‘Is your business on Facebook?’” he said. “Well, of course your business is on Facebook, because every business has got to be on Facebook.”
Breikss noted that as Facebook’s market penetration and archive of information from its users have increased, it’s become more valuable to advertisers.
He pointed out that no other form of advertising currently can target ads as precisely as Facebook.
Not only is Facebook keeping local marketing companies like 6s busy, but it’s also creating spinoff business for other local companies. In January, technology company Strutta launched a platform that allows companies to build photo or video-submission Facebook contests to promote themselves.
Strutta CEO Ben Pickering said the company launched a contest-building platform two years ago. But he said it recently saw an opportunity to expand the platform to allow companies to run their contests through a Facebook application rather than via the original setup of a stand-alone website.
Strutta said the new option has quickly attracted interest. But Breikss pointed out that while companies should have social media and Facebook strategies, they need to focus on online marketing rather than getting too attached to any one tool.
Because in the realm of online marketing, he said, change is guaranteed.
“Ten years ago, Yahoo! [Nasdaq:YHOO] was the most popular search engine and three years ago no one had heard of Twitter,” he said. “So what you need to have is a marketing strategy or content strategy or social media strategy in place that is really platform-agnostic, so that tools can come and go but your strategy stays on track.”