Advertising on Facebook should be cheaper, because companies cannot be sure of reaching many people beyond already converted followers.
That's the controversial judgment of Australian Professor Byron Sharp, one of the country's top analysts, from marketing sciences group the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.
Prof Sharp told a conference of TV marketers in London that, in order to grow, companies needed to reach out to people who were not regular buyers of goods in their market sector. He said Facebook fans “skew massively to the heaviest buyers, the people who are the easiest to reach.”
Such people, he added, “see you more often. You should pay less to reach those people.
“TV reaches your normal category buying base, but earned media skews to your heaviest buyers. It, therefore, is a lower quality media.”
Prof Sharp said that, therefore, aiming marketing towards occasional buyers rather than a company's followers was likely to be of “great strategic value”.
He used as an example the statistic that, in 2005, British people had been found to drink an average of 12 cans of Coke each. But in fact, fewer than five per cent bought this number
