Advertising on Facebook has always been a research direction for cross-border e-commerce. A comparison of referral sources from BuzzFeed, a well-known American news aggregation website known as the “media industry disruptor”, shows that in 2012, the news referral sources of Google and Facebook were comparable; but by 2013, Facebook had far surpassed Google and became the website with the largest referral source in the world.
Facebook is suitable for cross-border e-commerce SNS marketing and has its own unique advantages.
(1) Providing auxiliary online services to existing physical communities. Facebook’s initial success was achieved by providing college students with information services that physical communities could not obtain. This was an interactive student guide that included each student’s course plan and social network. Facebook did not create a new community that did not exist before. Instead, they provided a more important information and communication service to the existing physical community.
(2) Limit user registration to create an ideal online service. Facebook made a very important product decision to ensure coordination and trust between the physical community and the online service. Facebook was initially limited to users who could verify their university’s .edu email address, and also limited the students that users could search or browse to only those in the user’s university. The goal of these measures is to make users feel that the site is exclusive and limited to people within their actual community (college or university). After opening the door to users outside the .edu education network, they created a series of network zones to complete this plan. When users join these network zones, they can only see members of the specific network. In addition, Facebook has implemented a series of privacy controls that allow users to accurately control who can view the information they provide. This approach makes users have a very high degree of trust in the site, and the relationship between users is more real, and they are more likely to accept the information they see.
(3) A collection of infiltrated micro-communities. Facebook attracts advertising opportunities more than other social networking sites because it can deeply penetrate a series of micro-communities. If a local advertiser wants to target a specific college campus, the Facebook website is the best way to deliver advertising information to the audience. The CPM (cost per thousand) of local advertising behavior is highly valued by advertisers because of its targeted nature. The 65% daily and 85% weekly user login rates ensure that advertisers can operate time-oriented advertising campaigns very effectively.
(4) Build a strong brand effect through user groups and advertisers. Advertisers want to build a brand, not just clicks. A strong brand can make many advertisers willing to work with it. A well-known and recognized brand can get better advertising. Facebook has done a very good public relations job, emphasizing the influence of Facebook on the lives of college students and online consumption.
(5) Public page source code. In the Web 2.0 era, through powerful search and subscription functions, netizens no longer need to repeatedly go to various types of BBS, blogs or portals to obtain useful information. Users have become increasingly annoyed by ubiquitous display ads and have become increasingly insensitive and numb to the massive amount of information that has not been filtered. Facebook fully grasped this trend and was the first to disclose its page source code, allowing various types of Internet content providers to develop and embed it.