Facebook is a persuasion platform that’s changing the advertising rulebook
Facebook is almost unrecognisable from its former self, and as the social media giant comes of age, Saleem Alhabash questions where the platform will go from here in this crossposting from The Conversation.
Facebook – the social network that started in a Harvard dorm room 15 years ago – has evolved into a media and advertising giant. It’s helped create a new age of precise consumer insights. With over 2 billion users worldwide, Facebook can offer granular data about each and every one of them to advertisers – not just demographics but the very narrowly defined interests, conversations and interactions they have on the platform. Advertisers try to leverage all that information into online purchases by directly targeting consumers with messages meant to stand out as they scroll through a newsfeed.
As a media and advertising psychology scholar, I’ve been researching Facebook and its effects on persuasion for the past 12 years. Long gone are the days of brands offering consumers meticulously crafted messages with mass appeal that provide strong arguments or important cues to get them to change their attitudes and behaviours.
Facebook has driven an ongoing digital revolution within the advertising industry, redefining the persuasive process advertisers have traditionally known. Now people communicate differently on and because of Facebook and other social media services. And their buying behaviours have changed too.
“Other studies my colleagues and I conducted found that expressing intentions to like, share and comment on something were strong positive predictors of participants’ readiness to enact relevant behaviours offline.”
Can you please expand on how this was conducted and is causal, not just correlated?
Not everything advertised on TV is from a bricks and mortar store as you suggest. Not all TV viewers need to get in their car, drive to the store or take the bus, pick through a pile of products and carry it to the register.
You seem to make a lot of general and sweeping statements. Like, “These behaviours have emerged over the years as indicators of online advertising and marketing effectiveness.” Can you elaborate on that?
Because “return on engagement” sounds like a warm and fuzzy metric that really means nothing. It seems to me like return on investment was lacking in some way, so the researchers came up with another metric to make it sound a little better.
Point 1: He’s speaking generally in reference to the way things were 10+ years ago, not saying that everything advertised on TV today is from a brick-and-mortar store.
Point 2: read the sentence immediately before for context.
Point 3: depends how it’s being measured. I think a sounder argument is that “return on engagement” and “return on investment” are the same thing if you’re measuring it right – i.e. the returns gained from investment in the engagement phase of the funnel, keeping in mind they’ll be longer term that a direct sales push
Hi Eye roll,
Point 1: I can’t see anything, anywhere that makes reference to the way things were 10 years ago. Saleem makes a direct comparison between Facebook and TV. If he means 10 years ago, perhaps he should write that.
Point 2: Still no statement about causal relationships between a specific ‘engagement behaviour’ and purchase. Again, just a sweeping ‘indicative’ statement.
Point 3: ‘Enagement’ is not a return. Raising brand awareness and recall are important -but clicking like on a meme or leaving a comment doesn’t mean I can recall a brand. Nor will most people, unless they have an interest. It’s a BS metric that doesn’t mean much and certain;y shouldn’t replace return on investment.
May I suggest a new metric?
RTS – Return To Sender. (Maybe MSU only recently got an internet connection.)