Isn’t it great when you and your friends are sharing the same memes? It’s always so exciting to find the like-minded people. But did you ever notice how yours and your friends’ or colleagues’ newsfeed roll about the same sort of contents? Kind of weird once you start noticing things like these on our favorite social media platform. Well, sorry but that’s how they make their money. Would you want to know how do they do that? To put it in simple term, Facebook newsfeed algorithm depends (read vastly if not entirely depends) on our general interests, our liked contents, commenting on or sharing behaviors. This idea might seem great on the surface to some. This sounds good only until you realize how Facebook makes things difficult` for brands to show their contents to us, the regular people. One simple fact might give you a glimpse of the big picture, 92% of digital marketers used Facebook ads in 2019. That’s how many digital marketing minds are trying to push through the competition. Their only objective is to get their clients’ contents to our newsfeed. And, to get to our newsfeed they boost their posts. Of course, smart brands tend to allocate their boosting budget smarter ways. And to do that, they do need to target the right slice of the audiences. 1.09 billion Peoples who are log into Facebook every day, digital marketers obviously need to pull their A-game to reach out to their right audience bracket.
And, despite their best efforts they must rely on Facebook’s algorithm at the end of the day. Is Facebook algorithm serving them, right? Honestly, Facebook’s boosting strategy hardly meets our demands these days. Would you want to know why are we saying this? Because these targeting parameters generalize our interests based on the crowd we move with. Just think for a moment, would you want to trade your newsfeed with our father or mother. No disrespect, no qualm. Just simple swap. When we are talking about contents, we engage with across social media platform, it’s not like “family who eats together stays together” thingy anymore, is it now? We are living with a family, living under the same roof, using the same internet connection, going to the same restaurants. Facebook’s algorithm is considering those common events to make targeting for the sponsored ads. For instance, let’s say a restaurant is trying to attain more customers, now if anyone analyzes the strategies rationally, they should offer schemes like certain percentage discounts, buy one get one offer, item prioritizing discounts etc. which will capture different streams of people inclining more towards the offer that suits them best. You cannot just give offers that would somewhat target the overall mass in general. Bet you can see how this targeting procedure failing us silently, don’t you? To be fair, Facebook boosting has a funneling process and Google has Pixels system. And honestly, they both have seen their best days in 2019. We need something very refined to generate more sales this decade. In 2020, we need something more sophisticated than just Facebook boosting, boosting funneling or Pixels. Can we rely on our favorite social media platform to meet our growing demand this year?
Monsurul Aziz
Head of Brand Marketing, Nagad
(Monsur has made it his mission to be a storyteller of the human experiences. His professional experience spans 12 years of exposure to multiple disciplines in branding, strategy, research, marketing, event management, publication and PR in engaging key stakeholders across sectors.)
