Rethinking marketing strategies on Facebook

Abstract

While many papers have discussed information diffusion and viral marketing on online social networks in general and Facebook in particular, none, to our knowledge, has looked at the different channels (pages, profiles and groups) offered by the Facebook platform from a strategic marketing perspective.
Nonetheless, the differences between the three channels are fundamental and strongly affect the control over the elements that define viral marketing, amongst which the size of the initial population and the structure of the network, and limit the access to information provided by Facebook.
In this paper, we consider four marketing strategies that could be used on Facebook: mass marketing, niche marketing, relational marketing and viral marketing, and determine the best channel to use for each strategy.
This paper opens new perspectives for strategic marketers who would like to take control over their marketing efforts and optimize their strategies.
We conclude in this research that pages are optimized for mass and niche marketing, while groups are the best support for relational marketing and profiles provide the necessary elements and control for viral marketing.