The three major trends on Facebook

Facebook is the most popular social networking site in the world. It develops every day in terms of new functions and or trends. Let’s talk about the three major trends:

1. Marketing via Facebook

Many companies discovered the positive effects of adding Facebook to their marketing channels. The reasons for this are that firstly marketing via Facebook can be highly successful at ‘any’ marketing budget. Secondly because it gives companies a chance to get to know more about their target groups. 

If a person likes the Coca-Cola page for instance, the company might be able to see nationality, age, hobbies and much more depending ofcourse on personal privacy settings. It is a great opportunity to do research on target groups much more precisely and therefore adapt products and or services to customer needs. Furthermore one can gather feedback regarding new marketing campaigns, for instance by uploading a new TV commercial and seeing how many people liked and commented on it. It works like a forecast regarding the success of certain marketing and or sales strategies and therefore increasinly interesting. 

2. From unknown to known via Facebook 

Becoming ‘famous’ is out there for everyone whether you are a student, or working for small, medium or large business organizations. Just have something interesting to tell, invite as many people in your target audience, for example in my case students of my university and the next day one might become famous. Another example is a group like ‘For sale in Groningen’ where people from Groningen can sell stuff without buying expensive announcements in newspapers. But also groups where people can offer student jobs are very important and only existing because there are social networks like Facebook. What Justin Bieber did via YouTube, you can do via Facebook.

3. Creating events and parties via Facebook

A trend which does not only have positive sides, is the trend of creating events and parties via Facebook. Firstly, of course creating events via Facebook makes sense if you chose certain guests you want to invite for a birthday party for instance but also for bigger events, Facebook is a good transmitter to reach a lot of people.  

But this can also go wrong for instance in the case of a girl who wanted to invite friends to her birthday party but ended up inviting the whole world. Another example is when people planned a party via Facebook in a certain city which surprised the police end resulted in severe fights. Facebook,  because of its popularity can help many people organize and communicate like for example we have seen with ‘the occupy movement’.

To sum up it can be said that Facebook like some other social networking sites offers a wide range of positive tools for companies and individuals but in the end we all need to monitor possible negative effects closely.