Travis Crowe's Blog

Facebook is clearly the front runner by far in terms of online social media websites. With this in mind the idea of a social media website is to be able to share with others over the internet. When you sign up for a free Facebook account essentially you are revealing your unknown self to the world.

Upon sign up many users choose to reveal their name, gender, age, phone number, email addresses as well as where they reside. One important thing to take away from this is that users choose the option to publish this personal information. This feature allows marketers to connect to the database and use the information we concede to develop a general idea of target audiences that they can try and promote to.

Facebook has made it even easier for external users such as marketers to identify certain demographics with apps such as the “like” button. This allows users to be able to “like” comments but more importantly groups, such as musicians, movies or companies. So why is this important? Well for one marketers can quickly identify and split potential consumers into groups based on what the average consumer “likes”.

This strategy has been further developed with the introduction of Facebook Places. This application reveals to other users where one’s current location is and which friends they are with. This also allows marketers to easily identify consumer patterns and favourite locations making the survey system obsolete in these circumstances and therefore applying the trend that Facebook provides for free.