The Future of Facebook and Your Wedding Business

Being on Facebook is not cool anymore. The early adopters and trend-setters are moving away. But these are also exactly the type of people brand advertisers want to reach. -- Magnus Hogland

Last week, statistics were released that showed that Facebook lost 6 million U.S. based users in May 2011 alone. If you've sat in any of my classes or read my blog over the years, you know that this type of decline is something I've been predicting -- and a prediction I've been quite unpopular and openly mocked for -- for the last four years.

Here are some thoughts on why people loved Facebook and why they're now leaving and how you can still make it work for your business:

In the beginning, Facebook owned its own hill. 
If you're familiar with the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, then you know that in order for your brand to succeed, you have to stand for something that no one else does. You need to own your own hill. Both the Hummer and the Mini Cooper succeeded because they weren't trying to compete with mid-size sedans. Their cars are big or small and they own their respective positions with no apologies.

When Facebook started it was the anti-MySpace. MySpace was getting busy, flashy, spammy and loud. Facebook came along and was immediately different. Both companies wanted to help people to connect, but they did it in different ways. On MySpace you could show off your personality by glittering up a custom background. On Facebook, everyone got the same background across the board, a "school uniform" of sorts. Without the glitter, you could focus on what mattered: the connecting. On MySpace, everyone you knew was on there plus a ton of people you didn't know who could stalk your page whenever they felt like it (this was before MySpace implemented private pages). Facebook not only didn't allow everyone, but you had to either have a college email address or a college alum email address to join.

I joined in early 2006 with a college alum email and liked it immediately. Some of my closest friends are scattered around the world and Facebook allowed me to easily keep in touch with them and see photos of their kids, whom I am an honorary aunt to. I was able to connect with people I cared about but don't get to see often in a private online setting. What wasn't to love?

Later, Facebook introduced the newsfeed and everyone freaked out, dubbing it "stalkerbook" and accusing Facebook of taking too much of a Big Brother role in people's lives. Before on Facebook, if you wanted to find out information on someone, you had to go to each individual page to see if they had updated it. Now, all the updates came directly to you. Marketers everywhere rejoiced.

The problem was that Facebook didn't have brand fan pages at the time, so brands were creating their own personal pages under their company names, a practice that was (and still is) firmly against Facebook's terms of service. Tapping into the deep psychological need most people have to be liked, these brand managers knew that people who didn't know them would accept their friend requests anyway so as not to offend. Even though Facebook deleted (and still does) these types of pages, they can't keep up with all of them, and soon people's accounts were being littered with spam updates from these "friends."

Facebook and Consumer Behavior
Fast forward a bit to where Facebook is at now. Companies can now have their own brand profile pages, where people can "like" the page to show affinity for the brand. This past month, Facebook rolled out the ability to tag brand pages in photos rather than just people (this new feature is still in its early phases and isn't fully functional for every brand type yet). When a user "likes" a page or is tagged in a photo, it shows up on the home page feed of all of their friends. So theoretically, you just need to get a few loyal fans who "like" everything you post and your brand is suddenly in front of tens of thousands of people. On paper, this is a dream for companies everywhere; the holy grail of easy marketing.

However, and this is important, what this fails to take into account is how people relate to Facebook and why they signed up for it in the first place. Now that Facebook is open to the public, people can connect with anyone and everyone. That psychological need to be liked and not offend people is still very much in play, so people are now "friends" with people they've never met. Met someone in passing at a networking event? Now they're friends with you on Facebook and have access to every photo and update that your grandmother and college roommates post to your wall. Yes, you can limit what they see, but the fundamental flaw in the design of Facebook's privacy settings is that the people with limited access know that you are limiting them. Telling someone they're on your b-list (or c-list or d-list) of friends is a social faux pas most people aren't willing to make.

To remedy the home page overload (mafia farmers spinning dreidels around Christmas trees) and blurring of boundaries Facebook has introduced, people now have the option to "hide" updates. Guess who they're hiding updates from? People they barely know but added in order to keep the peace and companies that they "liked" but don't care to see updates from every time they log in.

Yes, new studies show that many young people check Facebook on their phone when they first wake up, but they're not checking out brands before that first cup of coffee. They're seeing who broke up (or hooked up) with who, who heard back from the new job they've been waiting on, and other juicy bits of gossip. They're not rolling over, grabbing their iphone and saying "wow, I wonder what Sally Anne Wedding Planner has to say today." Remember, they've opted to hide most brand updates on their home page.

Another very important thing to keep in mind with Facebook is that giving someone or a company a "like" for their status update is a throwaway gesture. Run a contest on your page, and you'll get a bunch of likes, but most will hide your updates later. People want the giveaway, they don't want your spam. People will also give you the thumbs up because they think "that's a cool idea" or "yes, that's my friend and I'll give her a like to show my support" while scrolling through their page, but they aren't likely to engage with your page later.

Google and where Facebook lost its soul. 
In my opinion, this mass exodus from Facebook is only going to continue and it's been a long time coming. Facebook's slippery slope began when it strayed from its core and seemingly decided that it wanted to take over the world. Facebook was the king when it came to connecting. Then they wanted everyone to use them the way they use Google. Not an impossible goal, but an unlikely one.

People do not use Facebook to search for something that's not on Facebook. Bing's results (and really, when was the last time anyone got excited about Bing?) may show at the bottom of the page, but people searching for something on Facebook are generally searching for something ON Facebook, not on the outside web. This means that when a bride or groom first gets engaged, they aren't turning to Facebook first to find ideas and vendors; they're turning to Google.

Google's been hinting at rolling out a wedding search engine for a long time now (that's for another post), and when they do, which do you think is going to show up first? Your blog or website or your Facebook business page? Add to that a growing rivalry when you consider that a month ago Facebook faced a public scandal when they were outed for trying to launch a pricey secret smear campaign against Google and which sites do you think Google will give preference to?

So, is Facebook just a big waste of time or does it still have some redeeming qualities?
Facebook isn't a complete waste of time, but if you are a wedding professional using it as your primary marketing vehicle, you are wasting your time.

If you take anything away from this post, let it be this: Facebook can be a fantastic platform for a company or brand to CONTINUE a conversation, but it is not an ideal platform for a brand to START a conversation.

If you are a photographer or cinematographer, you have a huge advantage when it comes to Facebook marketing. While you get the photos you need to tell the story of the wedding day, consider having a second or third shooter take flattering photos of all the guests at the reception. The reason? Everyone loves great photos of themselves. Detail shots are great for blog editorial features, but no one is tagging photos of a to-die-for napkin fold on Facebook. Upload flattering shots of real people from the weddings, watermark the photo with your website and allow everyone who attended the wedding to tag themselves in it.

For all types of wedding professionals: Facebook should be used to drive traffic to a platform you own: your website or your blog. These are platforms where people can subscribe via RSS, sign up for your newsletter and most importantly: where they know they can always find you regardless of other social media trends. If people continue to leave Facebook or if it decides to shut its doors next month, you'll have a home base established where people are already tuned in and an organic database filled with people who have given you permission to contact them. You may have 5000 fans on Facebook, but if your page is gone tomorrow, only a very small handful of those people are going to take the time to Google you and find where else you're at online.

So if the people I want to reach are leaving Facebook, what's the next big thing in social media?
I don't have a crystal ball, so I can't say for sure what types of social media platforms are going to be the next big thing. However, here are two things to look at when evaluating the long-term potential of a hot new online platform:

1. Look at its core, look at its core, look at its core. What is the platform about? Connecting people? Giving them 15 minutes of fame? Making a big splash and flipping quickly for a big payout? And most importantly, is it sticking to that core or straying from it? The social media platforms that will succeed for the longest are the ones that focus on common psychological needs: the need to be loved, seen, affirmed, etc.

2. Look at consumer behavior. It doesn't really matter how you want people to use something, is it how they really use it? Photos are still big on Facebook because they feed both the psychological need to be seen and because at its core, Facebook was about sharing and connecting over life's moments. When it comes to posting and sharing photos, the behavior of their users still honors those two things.

Facebook isn't dead, but it certainly isn't the place to be primarily focused on when it comes to marketing your wedding business. In my opinion, they strayed from their core in the quest for "more" and lost the magic of why people liked them in the first place. Creating a dynamic platform such as a website or blog is difficult work -- much more difficult than creating a Facebook page -- but it is work that will pay off the most for you in the social media space in the long-run.