Buisness and Facebook

Since its creation in 2004, Facebook has been expanding its services reaching out to larger groups such as businesses and non profits. Almost any reasonably sized company and many smaller ones now have a Facebook page. The intention here is clear as Facebook now has almost 1 billion users making the marketing potential immeasurable. So how does Facebook get used for a business? Obviously this is dependent on the type of business that we are talking about however many common trends appear when surfing between pages. Event announcements, new product information and customer interaction appear to be common on most if not all business pages.   The most active and often most successful pages are those of companies who ask for both written and visual feedback on their products. Outdoor equipment companies such as North Face, REI and Salomon all offer customers the opportunity to upload pictures and share stories about their experiences with a specific product. Clearly, this could have either beneficial or negative effects but by asking for the public's opinion the companies have established that they have a certain level of confidence in their products. The purchase of Instagram last month further increased the ability of consumers to effortlessly submit pictures of their purchases, providing these companies with a constant stream of free user generated advertising. Because of this it can be argued that Facebook has become one of the most valuable advertising tools companies of this type have at their disposal.

Elections and Twitter

This election is the first presidential election that we can see both candidates using Twitter somewhat effectively. In 2008 we saw what happens when only one party reaches out to the millions of readers on Twitter. This time around both parties are constantly bombarding their respective followers with updates on the campaigns in addition to their views of the opposing party. What is being said you ask? Well not much. The tweets that are released by both campaigns offer little to no extra insight into their views or policies.  In fact many of the posts are clearly excerpts from speeches.  Examples of families struggling to put food on the table and workers getting laid off coupled with non specific attacks on the opposing party are all to common and say little to nothing about the candidate himself. One area that Twitter does shine is the ability to quickly spread a personal message that may be time sensitive. This would be highly effective when used for damage control. Recently one of the candidates placed himself in a hole and spent the following 24 hour news cycle trying to dig himself out of it. Not one word of this problem was even mentioned on his Twitter account. Perhaps this has to do with the permanent nature of tweets or perhaps he felt that less was more in this particular case. Either way it seems that both parties are so nervous about crossing a line that they have actually decreased the effectiveness of a tool like Twitter by not offering any additional insight into their campaigns'. From now until November it will be very interesting to see if this changes with the increasing pressure.