Facebook for Business: Is This Target Marketing Immoral?
Businesses can now choose the exact type of person to advertise to with Facebook for business.
When you put out an advertisement in a newspaper or a magazine, you can estimate how many users you will reach, but you never really know. On Facebook for business, you get the exact numbers of how many people passed it on their newsfeed and how many people clicked it. Going even further, you can now see how many people actually buy your products if you use the “Shopping Feature”. Tracking your results on Facebook is awesome.
On your page, even if you’re just trying to utilize a content marketing strategy, you will get all of the information you want. It’s a built-in success statistic portfolio, with charts, graphs, and all of the information you would want to know about your advertisements. The best part is seeing your conversion rate. Now that Facebook practically owns all of this information about their users, it delivers that information to businesses using Facebook for business so that they can target them with their advertisements.
Now, you might be wondering: is this even legal? Well, actually it is. Now, there are questions about how invasive this is or “constitutionary”. The fact is that people put their information in on their own, and Facebook for business just takes advantage of that. Now, you can hate Facebook for doing it, for “betraying” their user base, but really they’re just trying to make their share of money, while supplying you with advertisements that you could be interested in.
It seems like exploitation because users like you and I are getting more advertisements, and ones that we’re statistically more likely to click on. This seems like we are at an unfair advantage and that businesses have even more control over innocent Facebook users. Well, it’s sort of just the way of the world. Hate Facebook for business or not, while it is using your information, it’s your fault for giving it to them.
You can argue many points about how it’s immoral and mean. And you might be right. However, they’re just taking their piece of the pie, especially as the most-used social media website in the world. If you’re supplying an entertainment platform for over 800 million people daily (the amount of users every day), you should probably get some compensation.
Yet, the direct exploitation with the ability for businesses to customize their target audience to include youyou, still seems like a bit much. But, there is nothing we can do about it when we’re volunteering our information to a public company. After all, everyone needs to remember that Facebook is a for-profit public company. It’s not the old MySpace we used to use back in the day or the little guy that would never display a business’s page. We’re talking about a conglomerate business here that’s going to use what you give them. So, don’t whine about it; if you want it to end, you have a choice: give them all of your information or… don’t.
