The power of Facebook

Shine Communications has given me the task to write pregnancy blogs for Mercy Care’s Family Planning unit, with the intension of the blogs being uploaded onto their Facebook page. The idea, is that each week, day or consecutive hour, a blog enlightening Mercy Care’s target audience about pregnancy will be uploaded, giving them advice and insight into the world of pregnancy and newborns. The target audience read the blog, hopefully find it interesting and useful, and if the blog is successful in its purpose, the person will return to their Facebook page to read another. Thus, the target audience is interested in their Facebook page and will now think of Mercy Care every time they need advice on pregnancy, thus mission accomplished. 15 blogs all up I’ll have to write, ranging from ‘how to deal with morning sickness’ to ‘how to prevent sibling rivalry’.

Being a 20-year-old university student, I already know how fantastic Facebook is, but this new task has now opened up my mind to the true power that Facebook now possesses. How this basic process, of simply uploading a blog onto a Facebook account every day, can potentially bring in new clients for a business.

Facebook seems to have a continuous flow of traffic between the accounts of the general public and organisations across the world, making it the perfect opportunity for all types of businesses to get involved and let Facebook do the broadcasting. So I did some research to see what businesses are actually taking advantage of this excellent marketing opportunity, and of course, how much impact Facebook really does have around the world for businesses.

• A total of 150 million people visit Facebook pages every day
• There are over 11 million Facebook users across Australia
• 90% of marketers use social media channels for business, with 93% of these rating social tools as “important”
• 43% of marketers have noticed an improvement in sales due to social campaigns
• The most popular social networking tool for marketing is Facebook – being used by 92%, followed by Twitter (84%), LinkedIn (71%) and blogs (68%)
• 23% of Fortune 500 companies have a public-facing corporate blog
• 58% of Fortune 500 companies have an active corporate Facebook account, 62% have an active corporate Twitter account
• 53% of small businesses are using social media, 88% believe exposure is the biggest benefit 

So, who needs to pay advertisers for their businesses to appear in the paper, on the radio, or on the television, when you can get a flourishing flow of activity from consumers on your very own Facebook page, for free?