Social Media Overview: Part 2 - Facebook
Facebook is by far the largest social media platform with over 3 billion active users. Its main markets are India, USA, and Indonesia.
Unlike most other social media sites, Facebook users are fairly evenly distributed by age, with its largest demographic between 25-34. Its users also slightly skew towards people who identify as male, with 56.5%.
How to Utilize
Facebook is the perfect catch all social media platform to target. It’s especially good if you want to direct community access, because it requires a personal account to use, so you can usually trust you’re interacting with real consumers.
Because of the massive number of options available for posting, Facebook can be treated as a hub for your content. Photos and videos are still the most engaging content on Facebook, but you can diversify your strategy, by sharing longer video content, posting blogs and articles, using polls to try to increase engagement, and even hosting in-person or online events.
One underappreciated aspect of Facebook is its groups. You can join groups within your niche and find a more guaranteed audience, than just by posting to your account. Because users on Facebook are seeking a more personalized experience, tailoring your content and brand identity to be more community focused is important.
Things to Consider
Facebook is probably the most comprehensive social media platform. However its generality comes with the drawback that none of its features are especially engaging for users. Whether this is a problem with the interface or declining usage is unclear, but Facebook sees much lower engagement rates compared to the other major platforms.
Changes to the Facebook algorithm have made organic growth much more challenging and without paying for targeted ads, it may be difficult to reach your target audience. For some companies, this isn’t an option, but for those that can leverage ads, Facebook has the user base to get your brand in front of a large audience.
Facebook also requires a much steeper time investment than some social media platforms. The recommendation is to post on Facebook 3-5 times per day and alternate content between photos, video, articles, and live videos. This isn’t feasible for smaller businesses and even for larger companies requires a full-time commitment from a team.