Why is Facebook Unique in the world of personal marketing? What are Facebook’s greatest strengths?

Facebook (FB) is one of the greatest invention in the human history after Google, it cemented the foundation of world wide web (www.), it somehow democratized human connection all over the world, through Facebook people are not only stay connected with their love ones but also getting to know with everyone all over the world. FB is very unique with its supercomputing data and algorithmic it can pinpoint an exact targeting segment of population with all its attributes like gender, age, income, demographic, preferences etc.. to be use by a company or group, it can even decide which friend is likely to have a similar taste with us.

This data oriented power is the very foundation that FB relies on. Through this huge amount of fast data harvesting power comes with great responsibility or better yet its weakness. The world is changing, people are no longer only interested in staying connected or doing commerce with FB but also participating in movements or sometimes uprising to light up a conversation that was once banned by a government or a country. FB strength is so powerful that it can spark an international uprising such as the Arab Spring, a movement such as Black Lives Matter (BLM) or even be bought or manipulated in an election by a third-party company like Cambridge Analytica, it can also be used to spread hoax news by terrorist groups and also official government such as Laos.

Facebook is not an original invention, Friendster and Myspace were, and sometimes the second invention after the original is the ones that often makes it better and much more successful by learning from the mistakes of the previous generations and also because the market has already get an idea or feeling of how to use the environment of the technology, so it is much more mature and ready than before. This gives Facebook a head start, and just like Malcolm Gladwell’s David & Goliath, he said “Sometimes your greatest competitors are not the ones you can see, sometimes they are the underdogs”. In the Adam Grant’s Originals, he said “Being original doesn’t require being first. It just means being different and better”.

In FB case I think its biggest competitor is Weibo from China then comes in Linkedin from Microsoft, Twitter from US and Tiktok from Bytedance China. I think the greatest risk that FB faces in the near future is the people itself, people are getting mature and communication are getting so much faster and so very democratize by every new media outlet out there that people are getting so overwhelmed by having too much data. People in the future will go back to crave for privacy, they will choose to decentralize everything. Millennials are slowly signing out of FB and Twitter because that’s where their parent hangout most of the time and also they are getting lesser attention span, they would prefer a close community and a simple quick editable app like Tiktok or Instagram to remain social.

There is so much that a company can gain by having a FB page, with its ability to pinpoint targeted audience and customizable different segmentation at a very low cost, any small local company can compete with big international brands, and also big brands will have the ability to be more creative with their leftover budgets to touch communities and to appeal to their causes, this is capitalism at its best.

For companies that are not in FB I think they are missing a great opportunity to brand themselves but if they are willing to experiment with other social medias, it think they still have the chance to compete and appeal especially to younger generations. By using exclusivity and rarity, a company can position itself as a limited offer or event. Millennials usually have this great sense of fear of missing out (FOMO), by appealing to this psychology, I think a company that is not on FB can still do something great.