In the post, Facebook Data: At Your Service, there was a section discussing if Social Media Marketing is suitable for your business. Social Media Marketing only makes sense if your target audiences are social media-ish.
With that, I don’t mean that your target audience must be social media savvy. They just need to be active users who are spending enough time on social media sites to be influenced by your marketing efforts. All businesses would first need to determine if their target audiences are generally social media-ish before making a decision. They would normally do that with statistics. But what should they look at to get an inkling of what their audiences are like?
Facebook is currently the largest and most frequently used social media site on the internet. In fact, anyone who is social media-ish would probably own an active Facebook account. Hence, by looking at Facebook data we could gain very valuable insights about our audiences. Before getting woozy with the numbers in your head, let me show you the things to look out for while analyzing available statistics.
Percentages Are Easy But Deceiving
Using July statistics
As you can see, Canada and UK have the highest percentage of FB users. This hints that people from Canada and UK are more likely to be engaged in social media. However, numbers cannot speak for themselves and with limited resources, how useful they can be depends heavily on how you interpret them. For example, you can just look at the numbers and say “oh, Canada and UK are definitely more social media-ish” but I can also say that you are not comparing fairly.
Numbers are affected by many factors. In this case, we did not take into account the total number of online users in each country when we should. If most of the population are not internet users, how are they going to use Facebook in the first place? Similarly, if most of them are using Facebook actively, we can be more certain that they are social media-ish.
Using July statistics
As you can see here with some simple tabulations, users from UK are not any more social media-ish than the United States; considering the percentage of FB users to online users. On the other hand, what you can see very clearly here is that the Philippines online user population is not too into Facebook. Hence, businesses targeting Philippines might want to think twice before jumping into Social Media Marketing (especially through Facebook).
Absolute Numbers Count, Obviously
Personally, I am not a big fan of percentages. I like to see absolute numbers because they are less misleading. As a marketer, it is only natural to be concern with exactly how many people I am reaching out to through Social Media Marketing. For simplicity sake, imagine I am a small business owner that targets everyone and anyone in Philippines. I wouldn’t care much about the percentage because if you ask me whether a reach of 2,945,380 FB active users is enough, I would say it’s more than enough. It all depends on your business target “appetite”.
Make Sure It’s Your Audience You Are Looking At
Online users living in the United States are generally social media-ish but that does not necessarily apply to your specific target audience. If you are Victoria’s Secret, you would only be bothered with the female demographics. Looking at the total Facebook users in United States is meaningless to you. It is crucial for any business to look at the right statistics. 250 million active Facebook users might sound like a great pool of audience but if you start filtering carefully, you might find that the number is significantly sliced.
For instance, if your business is targeting people in the age group of 18 to 24 from United States, you might very well consider social media as a marketing channel. This age group takes up about 19 million of the population, which means almost all of them are active Facebook users! This group of people is definitely social media-ish.
Statistics can be manipulated to favor anyone and anything. This does not mean that they are useless. When used properly, statistics is powerful and certainly very helpful. It is important to look at numbers and percentages objectively and eliminate any contributing factors that might sway your statistics. Just by looking at Facebook data, we can have an idea of how social media-ish our audiences are.
It is obviously not a foolproof method as there many other things to consider. Depending on culture, your audiences might not be receptive to Social Media Marketing even if they use social media services actively. Also, different geographical locations have different preferences. Facebook might not be some countries’ favorite social media site but that does not mean that they are not interested in social media. Research on your target audience as always, is crucial in any marketing plan. It is wise to try Social Media Marketing out and monitor the analytics carefully before going in full force.
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