Impact of Facebook Marketing on Proper

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experience by setting up an editorial calendar. .... 2008). Facebook lurkers generally avoid physical closeness with their obsession; they just wander through the.
Impact of Facebook Marketing on Proper Communication and Interaction with Customers.

Tan Li Wen Center for Southern New Hampshire University Program HELP College of Art and Technology Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Email: [email protected]

Rashad Yazdanifard Center for Southern New Hampshire University Program HELP College of Art and Technology Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Email: razhadyazdnifard.yahoo.com

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Abstract Facebook, the hottest and the most well-known social media network has increasingly shown the different values to different parties. In this urban century, Facebook are the most used social communication tool by people around the world with different time zone and different background which make it a strong platform to share or deliver message to the public in just a click on it. This is essential when it comes to business communications because it can deliver the company values through words and photos, while interaction and feedback could be gather at the same time. In this paper is representing the influence of Facebook marketing on business communications and how ethical issues are in place while interacting with customers. Keywords: Facebook, Facebook Marketing, Communication and Interaction with Customers, Ethical issues 1. Introduction Facebook is an online social network service. It is one of the largest social networking sites on the Internet. It has become a famous social media in this world. Facebook was founded in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with over 600 million users and present in over 70 countries (Ramsaran-Fowdar & Fowdar, 2013). By May 2005, Facebook have grown in probability until the website has grossed up to $100 million (Kumar 2013). Facebook marketing is a form of internet marketing or online marketing. Internet marketing can be broke down into more specialized areas such as Web marketing and social media marketing. Internet marketing is also the promotion of products and services on the web. Web marketing indulges in e-commerce website, promotional website and online advertisement. Internet marketing is a growing business marketing tool because many people is streaming internet for information. Online marketing is also a set of powerful tool used in promoting products and services through the Internet. Online marketing can get a lot of benefits such as reduced expenses, competitive advantage and improved customer service. Online marketing is also known as digital marketing. 2. Facebook From the article by Hepburn (2011), the statistics show the usage of 500 million users on the Facebook world, which is used by 1 in every 13 people on earth, with over 250 million of them who log in every day. 48% of 18-34 year old check their Facebook account when they wake up, they use Facebook to do their business. The 18-24 year old teenager is growing the fastest at 74% year on year. At least 700 billion minutes a month are used by people for Facebook. Over 200 million people access Facebook via their mobile phone. (Hepburn, 2011). People like to read news through Facebook. Overall, Facebook have over 50% of users logged in on a daily basis. Facebook has also reached in 1 billion users in world (Smith, 2013). Every day, about 250 million of users upload their pictures on Facebook (Condi, 2012). At the same time, another statistic shows that 13.3 Million of the total populations in Malaysia are Facebook users (Mahadi, 2013). This is a huge numbers that puts Malaysia on the 8 th rank in Asia and 21st place in the world (Talip, 2013). Those aged between 18 and 24 were the highest users, followed by those aged 25-34 years and 13-17 years (Mahadi, 2013). This statistics is telling us that today’s teenagers are exposed heavily on Facebook to communicate with their peers; by sharing the daily activities and interest through photos and videos. At the same time, there are also a huge numbers of advertisement and product shared by the business owners. According to Yesim (2010), users will usually browse through the news feeds shared by their friends once they log in their Facebook account. The interesting part of Facebook is users can also post up their current feeling or opinion on certain issues and here comes the interaction between friends in obtaining updates on each other. Besides, users can also select the options of every post to add photos or videos, besides setting the privacy of each post in order to avoid unwanted people from accessing too much of your information. Facebook notifications alert play an important roles to inform the user on latest reply or comment by other users.

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As a Facebook user, you have a personal profile that you can share your photos and videos (Andrew, Rem, & Neil, 2010). Facebook has becomes a famous social media to everybody. It helps communication become easier and stay connected with friends and family (Agrawal, 2013). Most of us own Facebook accounts and we just need to register an account before we are log on to the site. There are many interactive features and most importantly it is a user friendly tool with just a simple few clicks for any preference; to create a profile, to add friends, to get notified, to search for contact, to announce or even to chat on Facebook. Besides, user can create not just a user page; they could have a group page, a fan page or a business page according to different needs. Moreover the privacy setting in Facebook enables you to set who can see the specific part of the profile. Users can use their privacy settings to control who sees other information they have shared, as well as who can find them through search buttons. The next most important activity on Facebook is seeing pictures of others (Corina, Irina, & Vlad, 2012). It is interesting to analyze people who see other users’ pictures than to post their own pictures. By posting pictures, people can create their own personal reputation for images speak more than words. By posting all the pictures on Facebook they can create a certain profile and certain reputation in a society. People like to surf Facebook and they pay close attention to their friend’s activities (Agrawal, 2013).This is to obtain updated news and increase their knowledge through the sharing feature, which most of the people choose to ignore newspapers but grab the latest news or headline from Facebook. Facebook is absolutely a great platform to deliver messages; hence marketers believed that Facebook can make money for business (Agrawal, 2013). This is very important because business can sell their products or promote services to customers and Facebook is fulfilling all the criteria in promoting the business. Facebook communities where users are members are the most relevant for marketers (Ramsaran-Fowdar & Fowdar, 2013). Though these communities, marketers can identify customers taste in products. This can help marketers create a new market for customers. There is some popular examples from Facebook tools such as event sharing, the organization can post upcoming events on Facebook and let customers know more information about the event. Secondly, the organization can use Facebook messages to send products’ pictures to users, so that they could have a better look on the whole event. Besides, Facebook fan pages also can update all the information from the company. Nevertheless banners are also a good example to market a product because they are usually placed in eye catching site that allow users to click in for more interesting topic. 3. Facebook Marketing According to McDaniel, Lamb, & Hair (2012), marketing is the activity of an institution and processes for creating, communicating and delivering to the prospect group of people where the institution can share the value for partners, clients, customer and public. Facebook marketing is an online marketing or internet marketing and there are four easy steps to implement a Facebook marketing strategy (Vahl, 2013). First step is setting up a goal by creating a loyal community. For example, people who want to do business with you will usually want to get to know and trust you first. Second step is research, which is to identify your audience and where they spend their time. Third step is to design the Facebook experience by setting up an editorial calendar. For example, bunnies can plan a daily activity schedule. The last step is to measure your progress which is to understand how Facebook insights work. The emergence of Facebook as a marketing platform has ushered a new era of personalized and directed advertising. Facebook advertising has consequently grown in popularity. Facebook is considered an appealing platform for Internet marketing specialists and online advertisers (Ramsaran-Fowdar & Fowdar, 2013). Facebook offers a thorough and competitive tariff system, charging advertisers for a per-click or a per-impression model from the economic point of view. No doubt users will get attracted by how advertisers putting the business or even users do a quick comparison between vendors for any requirements through the images and reputations shown. According to Ramsaran-Fowdar & Fowdar (2013), customers are spending much more time with Facebook online marketing. Facebook allows companies to connect with people much more often than the companies would be able to approach through phone calls, emails, or meetings (Ramsaran-Fowdar & Fowdar, 2013). People are staying on Facebook for long periods every day for a variety of reason and activities. These offer a great chance to the marketer to connect with the user for any important news. This is much more effective that approaching through any order media channels.

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A few years ago, when social media networking was not available, customers had restricted access to brand information through traditional media. (Ramsaran-Fowdar & Fowdar, 2013).In those times, companies were able to position the brand in the mind of the consumer through their marketing strategies. Companies have to go through press conferences to promote their new products to markets, to advertise through traditional media such as newspaper or TV advertisement in order to reach out to the segmented market but with the presence of Facebook in the new era, the marketing strategies has changed. In addition, Facebook events are a great way of getting people together in local businesses, brands or products (Paul, 2009). This is a very economical way of getting the word out beyond your normal in-house marketing list by inviting the fans page. Fans can also help you promote your Facebook event to their friends by sharing the event if it seems of value to a group of their friends. The power sharing is beyond imagination and it automatically helps the marketer to reach out to a larger group of people with minimal resources in a short period. Moreover, social media is a great tool to build brand awareness (Yu, 2013). It can share the companies’ passion and loyalty to communities. In other words, it means that they should let consumers know what their companies will do. Social networking services are to maximize brand awareness that we have to navigate content through the many pitfalls of social media in order to make the return on investment successful. Facebook is becoming a new marketing tool for companies to enhance their brand awareness by leveraging the features available such as posted latest update and sharing upcoming activities. Marketing teams need to learn new communication strategies about how to maintain and improve long-term relationships with existing customers (Ramsaran-Fowdar & Fowdar, 2013). This is very important to be in trend especially when you are in a business to catch potential customers as it is the goal of every company in making more money. Besides, as Chloe (2012), said that mobile is a huge opportunity for the company to reach the objective to people around the world. Everyone goes online and moreover, there are huge group of people are on smart phone who can stay online unlimited hence the chances of accessing to Facebook is much higher than before. Facebook Marketing is playing an important role here by sharing the company activity with the right information to the right target audience. 4. Communication and interaction with customers Facebook makes communication much easier as people do not have the needs to meet face-to-face for communication. Facebook can be used for different purposes, two of the main ones being communication and socialization. (Corina, Irina, & Vlad, 2012). If using Facebook as marketing communication channel, we can get between a message sender and a message receiver. A businessman can send their products to customers through private messages, a photo of the products with a short description can sometimes create the interest of the user and business is done after a few more line of words or even after a phone conversation. Facebook can be an ideal alternative to telemarketing and marketing research (Ramsaran-Fowdar & Fowdar, 2013) because people are tired to telemarketing to order their products. Facebook is an excellent platform to direct response marketing to customers who can immediately direct answer marketing question and problem to customers. This can show how interaction with customers and organization can get a good feedback about their product form their customers. Furthermore, communication platforms can promote dialog with customers about products and services (Carino, Irina, & Vlad, 2012). The social networks can also be helpful as a source of information by observing the market place or even to receive an unexpected ideal from the feedback for future improvement. Interaction is the main focus point where people share the same interest and learning, exchanging information with each other (Buss & Strauss, 2009). There are certain fan pages which can help gather people with the same interest under the same roof they also could exchange their own opinion or experience and information. 5. Ethical issue Ethical issues arise in Facebook platform; everything becomes unreal in a virtual space. There are many unknown identity appearing through the networking for many different purposes.

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The term 'ethics' means understanding and adopting moral values within the home or workplace that should be defined (Borade, 2012). People from different backgrounds are gathered under the same roof and user have to be extra careful in determining whether or not the information received should be trusted, especially under virtual media platform. This is especially important if their personal information can be misuse or mislead. Privacy strategies are geared towards managing the Facebook profile (Alyson Leigh, 2013). It is very important that users’ privacy is well taken care of especially under virtual space where people can use fake identity to perform illegal activities by checking through another user. There are several strategies taken; for instance, to exclude message or contact information from others, to limit the profile option, to limit the unknown friend request and by approval to join in the user activity circle. Moreover, activities like removing photos and limited sharing are also examples of what Facebook is doing in protecting the users’ privacy, examples like photos are being stolen for other activities or being Photoshop for other purpose. Customer privacy is a problem because they cannot sell customers’ information (Meglio, 2013). When customers shop online, they leave an electronic trail that provides lots of information such as their name and address. The owner should not misuse or sell their customers’ information to others which might lead to many unknown illegal issue. Besides, there are business users who use Facebook messaging to blind the eye of the customers, photos of the product are nicely touched up but when the customer receive the real products, it does not look the same. This is an unethical business method and most of time; it is hard to maintain loyal customers to stay with the service. Furthermore, Facebook online game has shown that the biggest factors as users are addicted with gambling (Mortimer, 2012). Firstly they will play with free games online. People are addicted to online games and some games are related to gambling. This is unhealthy and causes many social issues like arguing with their parents for more money or worst to become a robber in order to get more fund for gambling. Most of the users use Facebook to create fake accounts (Hasan, 2013). Fake accounts are the biggest problem on Facebook. People often use fake accounts to harass someone they do not like or they are interested in, or even to hide the person’s real identity in order to cheat a user. There are many newscasts about the ethical issue in this virtual space hence it is important to know and to protect the personal data in avoiding the misuse of data by other parties for illegal activities. A stalker may be crazier in the sense because they may attempt the contact information from someone (Bianca, 2008). Facebook lurkers generally avoid physical closeness with their obsession; they just wander through the profile of the person. Facebook stalker take it a step further they will always stalk the profile of the person. The social network Facebook allows people to put their personal information on internet (Bianca, 2008). People can stalk you and get your personal information by using Facebook. Once a person become a target of the stalker, it is very dangerous because the stalker can always bring danger to a user that causes many social problems such as kidnapping that sometimes can lead to death. 6. Discussion Facebook marketing is the new platform for business in this new era. Businesses use Facebook for marketing and can get a lot of benefits such as business can connect and build relationship with customers by having private conversation with clients. Secondly, Facebook allow free advertising to business. Lastly, Facebook can announce important event update and the power sharing could help create awareness too. The biggest reason for the success of Facebook is advertising (Kulkarni, 2013). Business or a company can through Facebook advertising to promote their new product. Facebook pages let business create multiple advertising with multiple pictures. It also allows business updated the latest news of the products to customers. Business can update pictures and some interesting videos of the products through fan pages. It will get much easier in terms of businesses how businesses communicate with their customers. Businesses do not have to go through traditional media such as TV program and newspapers for advertisement which is very high in cost. Facebook is the best way to allow users to communicate with their friends and family. Facebook provides private messaging to let users communicate with the person they wanted to chat with. No matter how far the distance, users can still communicate with them. It helps communication become easier and maintain connection with friends and family.

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The keyword of social media ethical issue is that social media was designed for social communication which of most of the adult and business has been considered private and protect space. However social media makes communication become more public. Once information become public then the way it is used is no longer for the presenter. Social media tool can be excellent for creating and supporting relationship by family and friends (Jeff, Fink, & Joseph 2010). They have potential to increase communication and improve relationship with family and friends. At the same time, the openness of social media presents the potential of ethically challenging confrontation when one or more family and friends provide improved information. 7. Conclusion Facebook is one of the largest social networking sites on the Internet. It has become a famous social media in the world. Facebook can be a low-cost way to connect friends and family members. They do not have the needs to meet face-to-face for communication. Facebook is not just a fun way to stay in touch with friends and family. Nowadays, online marketing is not something new to every one of us. They are using online marketing to buy the products they want on Internet. Customers do not have to visit physical shop for goods which benefits us because it saves our time. Social networking services are to maximize brand awareness that we have to navigate contents through the many pitfalls of social media in order to make the return on investment successful. This also is the new platforms for Facebook marketing. Communication platforms also can promote products and services to customers. Facebook is an incredibly powerful marketing tool, it can be accessed free of charge. Facebook does not replace the traditional marketing tools but can be used as a complement to existing traditional promotional tools. Combined with a quality websites, Facebook can become the most cost-effective tool in the marketing arsenal. Ethical issue arise in Facebook platform, everything becomes virtual in a virtual space. There are many unknown identity appearing through the networking for many different purposes. For example, business or a company cannot sell customer privacy information to others. Besides that, user can communicate with their friends and family through privacy messages. In conclusion, Facebook is one of the largest social networking because it can bring a lot of convenience to a user, a business or even a company.

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