As you've seen in the previous videos, there a few social media networks that are so big that you need to keep them in mind as you plan your social media marketing. I'm sure you use several of them on a daily basis, but even if you don't, it's a good idea to understand how people use them, who uses them, and how businesses can participate on each of these platforms. In this lesson, we will give you an overview of the biggest platforms, we won't go through all the details. But by the end of this lesson, you will have a good feel for how people and businesses use the major social networks. In this first video, we focus on the biggest network: Facebook. We have already given you backgrounds on the company and the different products it offers. But now let's look at how people in businesses use Facebook. Facebook is one of the most widely used social media networks in the world. Today, 2.6 billion people use Facebook every month. According to Pew Research Survey, roughly 7 in 10 adults in the US use Facebook, and 74% of the people who use it report visiting Facebook at least once a day. Facebook is popular amongst teens in the US with 51% of America's teens reporting being on Facebook, but other social networking platforms like Instagram and Snapchat are more popular amongst America teens. It's interesting to note that usage of Facebook is growing among older Americans. The number of Americans over 65 using Facebook has more than doubled since August 2012. Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what's going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them. On the other hand, businesses can use Facebook to learn more about their customers, find new ones, and build lasting relationships with them. Let's look at how people use, the platform many features it offers, and how businesses can be part of its vibrant community. To start using Facebook, you need to create an account. Note, you must be at least 13 years old to create a Facebook account. To create a Facebook account, all you need to do is to go to www.facebook.com or the Facebook app on your mobile device. And the enter your name, email or phone, password, date of birth, and gender. After you create your account and log into Facebook, you can start editing your profile, your profile tells your story. You can choose to share information about yourself like your interests and personal information, your hometown for instance, and your birthday. You can also choose who you want to share this information with by controlling your privacy settings. You can opt to share the information with the public, which means that anyone who has a Facebook account can see it, or you can just share it with your friends. Friending someone on Facebook helps you stay connected with people you care about. Adding a friend means you'll be able to see each other's profile and activity on Facebook. You control who your friends are and you can always unfriend someone or you can block people if you don't want them to see you on Facebook. Stay connected by creating a post to share updates about your life with your Facebook friends. Here are just a few things you can share with your post. You can share words to express your thoughts and opinions, or a feeling you have right now, like feeling grateful, or feeling pumped, or an activity you're currently doing, like celebrating a birthday or attending a wedding. You can share photos and videos that capture significant moments in your life, or animated gifs that reveal your mood. Animated gifs are very short video fragments often played on repeat. You can also share your current location, show people where you are by checking in. A link to a site you want people to check out, like an article you just read or a recipe you just tried. You can also choose to share your updates by adding them to your story. Your stories will be visible to your selected audience for 24 hours. Any photos or videos you add to your story on Facebook will also appear in your story on Messenger. Stories use a vertical format which was designed with mobile phones in mind. When you share a post, it may appear on your friends news feed, a rolling list of updates that people see when they first log on to Facebook. Similarly, after you added friends on Facebook, you'll also be able to see their updates on your news feed. Stories appear above the news feed of the people you decide to share your story with, as well as in their, Messenger inbox. When you see a post from a friend on your news feed, you get engaged with it in a few different ways. You can like the post by just clicking Like or express a more specific reaction to it such as love or laugh, sad or angry. You can leave a comment in the form of words, photos and videos or even GIFS to share a response. If you want your friends to see the post, you can also share the post on your own profile by clicking Share. In addition to posts from your friends, you could also see updates from people you find interesting but don't know personally like journalists or celebrities on your news feed. While you can't directly add them as a friend, you can do this by following them. Well known public figures with large followings are verified by Facebook and they have a blue badge next to their name to help you know that they really are who they claim to be. Connect with other people by joining groups on Facebook. Groups are a place to communicate about shared interests with certain people. You can create a group for anything, your family reunion, your after work sports team, or your book club. When you join a group, posts from that group will start appearing in your news feed as well. As you can see, Facebook makes it easy for people to not only stay connected with their loved ones, but also stay up-to-date with things and issues that interest them, which can include a business. When businesses use Facebook, instead of a profile, they can create a Facebook page. It's where people can connect with the business to learn more about its products or services. Similarly to a profile, when you set up a page on Facebook, you can add information about your business. You can add a cover photo and profile picture that best represents your business. You can also provide contact information like your website, your address, your phone number and business hours. Just as you can post updates on your profile, businesses can also share posts on their page. People come to business pages looking to learn more about the business and its products, hear about latest news and promotions. So it's important for businesses to post on a regular basis. Many businesses build a presence on Facebook to tell their business's story. There are a variety of visual formats available to help you with that. Here are three different types of posts you can create on a business page: story posts, video posts and photo posts. These different post types help to capture attention and prompt action. Let's take a look at how stationery company Ink Meets Paper uses their page to communicate with their customers. They've chosen a profile picture that represents their business and an appealing cover photo that features one of their products. This is an example of a video they shared that demonstrates how their products can be used, specifically their brush pens in this case. They keep their customers updated on the latest status and their store opening hours through a photo and a status update. They also kept people informed of their store hours during COVID-19 on their page, which shows up as an update. And they set up a Facebook shop which allows them to sell their products directly on their page. There are many other free tools businesses can use on Facebook to achieve their unique business goals like events, groups and jobs. More than 140 million businesses use Facebook products every month to find new customers, hire employees or engage with their communities. As businesses grow their online presence, they may want to reach more people than those that follow their page already. Facebook offers advertising solutions where you can create and run campaigns using simple self serve tools and track the performance of that campaign with easy to read reports. Running an ad directly from your page is the easiest way to start advertising and find more people who might be interested in what your business has to offer. This is called boosting a post. Boosted posts to do exactly what their name suggests. You can boost a post you already made on your page so more people see it. Beyond boosted posts, you can also use a tool called Facebook ads manager. You can think of ads manager as a one stop shop for all things advertising with Facebook. Facebook ads created through ads manager offer more advanced customization solutions. There are more options available to help you reach your specific business goals and the audiences you care most about. Ads manager makes it easy to create ads, it let's you create ads in a step by step process. You'll choose the market. Objective that most aligns with your business goal. You'll choose the people you want to connect with, the places to show your ads, and what the ad will look like. And you control exactly how much you spent on advertising. Ads Manager has advanced targeting tools that can help you focus on the people who matter most to your business. Whether you want your ads to be shown to people based on age, location, hobbies, or something else Ads Manager can help you connect to people who are likely to be interested in what you offer. We will learn a lot more about Facebook in the rest of this program, but I hope that this overview is a good starting point. As you get a better feel for the different social media platforms that can feature in marketing. Next, let's look at another very large platform, YouTube.
