Facebook: a new era of marketing.: A quantitative study on the effectiveness of Facebook marketing

Abstract: There has been a vivid debate within the marketing community concerning what role social media has in influencing brand perceptions and consumer behaviour. The success of Facebook has not escaped the spotlight or the professionals’ attention, but there is a clear absence of quantitative research supporting the debate. Many brands have already entered the Facebook arena and due to the economic benefits of the platform, brands with a low marketing budget can be tempted to join the race. The purpose of this thesis is to, with a quantitative approach, determine whether Facebook is an effective marketing medium and if a creative communications approach is to prefer before a selling approach. An experiment was conducted where a sample of respondents were exposed to a selection of fictive fan pages on Facebook during one weeks time. Four sample-groups were exposed to different status updates, with different combinations of tonality (i.e. selling and creative) and frequency. The results showed that a selling approach is to prefer when communicating via Facebook news feeds to younger segments. This supports further research and debate on the subject due to the fact that recent research has proven that a creative tonality should, generally, have better effects on brand perceptions and key advertisement indicators.