Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Baidu, Snapchat, Pinterest, LinkedIn – How to browse the social media world?
Obviously, the right answer is always “it depends”. On thousands factors: the goals, the target, the demographic profile of the users, the campaign kind, the budget… and obviously also the number of active users on each social platform.
Thirty million Italians are connected to Facebook…
What we can say for sure, though, at least in Italy, is that in a mass market perspective, with Facebook we can’t go wrong. Actually all the Italians active in the social networks have an account on Mark Zuckerberg’s platform.
This was well explained, in an interview with Il Sole24Ore, by Luca Colombo, Country Manager for Facebook in Italy: active users in our country have exceeded 30 million per month. It’s a figure that compared with the latest Digital in 2017 Global Overview (a partnership research by We are social and Hootsuite) confirms the almost perfect numerical identity between the active social media population in Italy and the number of active accounts on Facebook.
…28 million are connected by mobile…
Even more analytical turned digital strategist Vincenzo Cosenza, who disaggregated the figures, thus getting also the number of active users per day (24 million) as well as the number of active mobile users (28 million per month and 23 million per day).
In short, 97 percent of the Italians accessing the Internet daily connect to Facebook, and for the most part they do it from their smart phones or tablets.
…but to reach out to them you have to pay
May we then ignore these figures and just postpone our business presence on a social media like Facebook? Well, I would say that in this case we’d better give up “it depends” and slightly give way to a “no” answer.
After all, 70 million companies in the world have a Facebook page, and five million of them use this platform to advertise – such figures led the blue social to double profits in the first quarter of this year, boosting revenue by 51 percent and confirming its leading role in mobile advertising.
And that is where the shoe pinches…
Yep. Being on Facebook with a business page is no longer enough to engage customers or fans. Advertising is becoming virtually compulsory due to the progressive reduction in organic reach, developed by Zuckerberg’s team algorithms (the Edgerank currently guarantees an organic reach between 6% and 1% of the fanbase, with a projection tending to 0% over the next few years) – so much so that there seems to be an inversely proportional relationship with the value of Facebook actions (as well explains Convince & Convert in this article).
Three things to do right away
It’s just nothing to be surprised of: social media are not free (we will never tire of repeating it) and Facebook isn’t a non-profit association.
Which conclusions should we rather draw from these data? I would say at least three:
1. the first one is that if we aren’t on Mark Zuckerberg’s social network yet, it’s time to open a business page;
2. the second one is that if we want to engage our stakeholders, we must allocate part of our budget to a social media marketing campaign;
3. the third one is that, especially in the summertime, we need to think about a mobile campaign (people go to the beach with the phone, not with the PC).