Do not work for facebook; make it work for you!

I am sorry but I am going to use a less formal style writing this post ; the truth is during the past several months, I have witnessed a very strange and bizarre practice in TV commercials of some of the world’s top brands that made me question how these brands are embracing the social platform ‘facebook’. In fact, at the end of these commercials, spectators are asked to search for and ‘’like’’ the brand’s page on facebook. By doing so, the brand has indirectly through its ‘’million dollar’’ TV Ad contributed to increase facebook popularity and that’s a waste of time and money if you ask me!

Brands like ‘Nivea’, ‘Lacoste’, ‘Jaguar’ and many others are now involved in social media more than ever. Yet, from a strategic perspective, is advertising for the brand’s fan page at the expense of the brand’s website the right thing to do? Personally, I do not think facebook is likely to continue growing. Contrarily, I think it’s a trend that is on its way to fade gradually – the days where I was using facebook to ‘socialize’ are long gone and I have seen many of my friends leaving the platform for good – Not to mention the whole privacy issue, there are several factors that I think are decreasing facebook popularity; there is the fact that you can’t prevent or control any change in the platform especially the very annoying change in design. Another fact is the change in Google’s algorithm and the rise of the new fast growing social platform Google+.

In my opinion, brands need to focus more on driving traffic to their own websites instead of driving traffic to facebook or to whichever website. Everybody agrees that a website value is weighted by the number of its visitors. In this matter, I truly don’t get the point of driving valuable traffic to a social media website!