Facebook is town-square of internet
“If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make sound”. Philosopher George Berkeley: A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710)
This is a digital generation; businesses must make digital footprints into this Facebook-era. The modern generation lives in digital “shelters” and those are the doors that business titans must be knocking.
One way to do this is by buying a plot in the digital locality; creating owns website. That is the beginning; second the site must have an attractive lawn covered with exquisite star grass and tulips to drum up patronage.
I must say this that most of the websites for many companies in this country look like a yard with flowers that are only watered when the rains fall; they are rarely updated and miss information about things that matter the most.
The internet is a place littered with information. This makes it difficult to notice anybody shouting from the top of Mount Everest. So, how does anybody make an impact in such a noisy atmosphere? Read on.
Ours is a generation of social networking. Facebook and WhatsApp are the lions and leopards of that jungle. Premises exist to support such audacious conclusion. By June 2017, Facebook had 2.01 billion monthly active users. This represents 17 PE year-over-year growth. Out these, 1.7 billion were mobile users.
55 billion messages are sent with WhatsApp every day. The app is used to make 100 million calls daily. Except for the BBC (born before computers), for most people, WhatsApp is a primary source of communication.
When one senior policeman decided to use his wife for a punching bag, I first got it from WhatsApp. By the time lady presenters were ranting about it on national TV stations, it was a piece of history ready for achieving on social media.
The point is that you do not have to drive a Cadillac to make your presence felt on the digital highways. All you have to do is to let your brand catch a lift on the already glamorous Facebook and WhatsApp motorcade.
For example, instead of banks sending transaction alerts via a GSM pipe, why not through WhatsApp conduit? The hiccup is of course that WhatsApp is heavily guarded by its owner Facebook. To achieve this there is need for a tool called Application Programming Interface (API) to link up the two systems. Facebook does not let go those no matter how much gold is dangled.
On the other hand, Facebook has a free API; Facebook Connect. If you have a Twitter and Facebook accounts you can link the two so that whatever you post on Facebook becomes a tweet on Twitter. If you are a bookworm like me, you can log to your good reads account with Facebook. Your salacious book reviews automatically appear on your Facebook wall. All that is Facebook Connect at work.
In the same way, companies can connect their websites to Facebook. After all, is that not where the people are?
The downside is that Facebook is Americanism; freedom of speech, so, be ready to handle a cobweb of complaints in truly unpalatable language from customers. But they say in the vernacular that Wandisokosera nkuligautanva (It is only noise after the message sinks in).
I rest my case, my ladyship.
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