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?
