World Day without Facebook: how to do without it?

Almost 20 years ago, a visionary sociologist prophesied: “One day, only grannies will be left on Facebook!” In truth, that day has arrived, and if you want to make a teenager or young adult laugh, ask them for their Facebook profile! They’ll look at you as if you’re asking to borrow Annie Cordy’s latest 45 rpm record!

And on this World Day without Facebook, it has to be said that, even under its new name of Meta, Facebook isn’t what it used to be. Nevertheless, while individuals – with the exception of senior citizens – have abandoned it for other fashionable platforms, businesses have found it to be a new way of communicating. It’s less institutional than a website, less professional than LinkedIn and less purely visual than Instagram. A direct way of becoming part of the daily lives of consumers and customers.

Of course, if you want to promote a rapper for teenagers, forget Facebook, as the average age of its users is 42, and they are mainly women.

But to the question “Is it still useful for a business to communicate on Facebook?“, the answer is clearly yes! Currently, 160 million businesses worldwide are present on it, including 80 million SMEs. For example, in the third quarter of 2020, Facebook announced that 10 million active advertisers were using the platform to promote their products and services (search engine advertising), compared to 7 million advertisers in the first quarter of the previous year.

Today, Facebook continues to be widely used by marketers such as agencies and advertisers. It is used by 96% of B2C marketers and 91% of B2B marketers, and 58% of marketers plan to increase their Facebook Ads budget in 2023!

What works best for promoting a product? Videos, of course! Daily, 100 million hours of video content flood the platform, knowing that Facebook generates over eight billion daily video views on average!

Facebook native videos are used by 49% of marketing professionals, ranking second behind YouTube videos (55%). Facebook Stories (500 million daily users) rank fourth (32% of marketers use them), behind Instagram Stories.

And just for the fun of it, the most followed Facebook pages worldwide by number of fans are Facebook App (216 million), followed by Samsung (159 million), Cristiano Ronaldo (126 million), Real Madrid (109 million), the main Chinese television channel CGTN (106 million), Coca-Cola (106 million), Tasty (103 million), FC Barcelona (101 million), and Shakira (99 million).

In short, even though Facebook no longer has the panache it had in its early days – it was created almost 20 years ago, after all (thanks, Mark) – it still packs a punch, even with its groups of sprightly grannies!

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