Tips on social media marketing from Facebook’s Rahul Gupta

Photo credit: Pixabay.

If you’re a marketer, you know how Facebook’s advertising tools can help you target only those who want to see the content you want to share. But to do it effectively so that potential consumers see and interact with your ads is no turkey shoot. Rahul Gupta, Facebook’s Client Partner – South East Asia, gave us a primer at the Tech in Asia Singapore 2017 conference.

All of us are in the crux of the next big transformation.

He started with the story of Sylvester “Pat” Weaver.

At 29, Pat Weaver was heading the radio department of Young & Rubicam. This was in 1937. Advertising was all about 30-minute-long soaps about products in those days. Later, he joined NBC. Television too was running half-an-hour-long radio-style ads, and that didn’t make any sense to Weaver. Television viewers were a different breed, who were consuming content in an entirely different fashion compared to radio consumption, he felt. Weaver was the first to cut short the 30-minute ad slots to 30 seconds for TV. There was much uproar about it. But he stuck to his ground and eventually, that became the norm.

Weaver scripted the biggest transformation in the advertising industry so far. “His persistence in changing the ad format resulted in a massive uphaul in the TV industry, which grew from US$12.3 million to US$3 billion in three years because of that move,” Gupta says, adding that TV hasn’t changed since then in the last 60 years.

“All of us are in the crux of the next big transformation,” Gupta says. But for that – like Weaver did – we need to understand the way consumers are behaving.

“Mobile will be the heart of the consumer journey. We are at the tip of the iceberg right now. We will keep that focus at Facebook,” he says.

Watch out! Soon, the consumer will be in control

Photo credit: Pixabay.

Mobile is increasingly becoming the center of where consumers spend time. This is great because “mobile will allow us to do personalized marketing at scale. Rather than one mass message to everyone, you could personalize the message to speak to people and target them based on their interests alone,” Gupta notes.

Mass media – like television – can stick an ad bang in the middle of a favorite TV show and consumers will live with it, though begrudgingly. “But the consumer will be in control soon. Rather the consumer’s thumb will be in control – so we have to work harder in the scenario where consumers will switch off if they are not interested,” Gupta warns.

“If you are running a fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) company, you should be thinking: why should the same ad be shown to a first-time user of the product as well as to a competitive consumer who keeps switching products? Technology will enable us to tailor it,” he says.

The rise of a new visual language

The next big challenge will be figuring out the best way to tell our story, Gupta says.

You need 3 types of video feed