The second half of the year has barely started and we already have a heat wave, awards season in Cannes, new political candidates, the end of the Hot Sale and, again, a lot of heat. In the midst of all this pending, I had a meeting this week with one of our clients that we have had for several years that he left me thinking, once again, about the direction of social networks in the short term. From here to the next 2, 3 years. Here I tell it.
In the midst of the furor of Instagram or TikTok or Artificial Intelligence, there are still brands —and audiences— that are still present and very current on social networks like Facebook. Many companies are taking and diversifying their efforts to other networks, precisely because this is how trends are changing. But there are others whose audience is very well captive on Meta, particularly on Facebook. And that means that the channel with which it helps to generate prospecting and sales does not change —and will not change in the years to come.
On this point, Facebook statistics continue to surprise. It is one of the TOP 5 most used social networks in the world and, although it has lost influence, as I always say in these lines, it has maintained a good level of retention. Furthermore, the highest peak of users is between 25 to 34 years old. And, if we take into account the ages from 25 to 44, between both segments, we will realize that they represent 48% of the entire platform.
Many have given up this platform for dead, as the same is foreshadowed with Google, in the face of the imminent wave of Artificial Intelligence, but you cannot simply ignore the effectiveness that these platforms still have.
I was talking about this precisely with one of my clients during the week. One of them who has been in our agency for several years, Los Magicians, since they continue to be surprised with the results that Facebook generates, particularly for their market niche. And of course, when I redraw the buyer persona in my mind, it made all the sense to me why Facebook continues to deliver amazing results: those decision makers are precisely in the aforementioned age range.
That is why Facebook continues to work very well after a few years in which we have renewed the campaigns countless times. Not only that, they have generated Investment Returns of 40 to 1. Outrageous if you ask me. And it is that precisely during the last months we had a fundamental renovation in the campaigns and right now we have leads of the highest quality and a percentage of intention very close to closing. And all this achieved in a channel that was believed to be “out of the loop”.
In this sense, it is the effect that I have talked about several times in this column: resistance to change. Facebook has this perception that it is the platform best adapted to brands and, in turn, the one that offers the best solutions in terms of advertising and segmentation in the world. Not only that: it is also the simplest interface and where historically the results for SMEs, medium-sized and even large transnational brands have been reflected. In that sense, Facebook still retains that medal, as does Google.
Many platforms will have the banner of being the “coolest” like Instagram or TikTok, but they still have not managed to convince certain decision makers. And the funny thing is that these people are on Facebook, they do see products on that platform, they do register and they do make the purchase/registration/whislist decision from their phone.
Not bad for a brand that was born in 2004 and that will celebrate its 20th anniversary in the market next year. A social network that came to revolutionize marketing as we knew it up to that moment and that laid the foundations for many of the things that came later.
With the example of my client, I kept thinking that there will be Facebook for a long time to come, in the same way that there will be Google for a long time. In the same way that there will be Television and other media such as the press or radio. Although perhaps they will stop calling themselves “massive” to be only of certain niches. And that is not good or bad, you just have to know where our target is moving.