What Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp means for Online Marketing 2014?

At the end of February 2014, it was announced that social media giant Facebook would buy WhatsApp, a social messaging company, for a whopping $19 billion USD. The move came as WhatsApp hit the 450 million user mark and estimates showed that it would continue to gain around a million additional users a day. For Facebook, the most popular social media platform in the world with over 1.4 billion active users, buying the world’s most popular messaging app is just another step on the way to their domination of the way people communicate in the Internet Age.

 

What the Acquisition Says About Social Media in Marketing

If Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp proves anything, it’s the importance social media plays in the business marketing sphere in 2014. Keep in mind, of WhatsApps 450 million and growing user-base, 70% use the application on a daily basis. On the other hand, only 62% of Facebook users use the big blue social media giant daily. For Zuckerberg and the rest of the Facebook team, WhatsApp was poised to draw significant marketing revenue away from them. Keep in mind, 70% of businesses say they’re going to spend more on social media marketing in 2014, and Facebook doesn’t want that spending going anywhere but to its coffers. Zuck and the gang have taken a time-honored approach to competition in business: if you can’t beat them, buy them.

Why You Need to Keep Using the Expanded Facebook

With this purchase, Facebook proves it understands the pivotal role it and other social media platforms play in the online marketing game. Just in case you aren’t clear on what the purchase means to you, think of it this way: Facebook now controls a bigger portion of the social media playing field and is playing an increasingly important role in successful online marketing with social media. You need to continue to take steps to please the powers that be. Here’s why:

• Social Media is the Fast-Track to Online Recognition

SEO, content marketing, and the like are all insanely effective when it comes to successfully building a presence online. However, you first have to draw people to your neck of the internet. By building a presence on social media platforms, places you know billions of people visit daily, you can skip over the part where you have to wait for people to come to you.

• Social Media is Like an Acceptable Link-Farm

In the past, to build links to your site, you would have to rely on link-farms. Of course, then Google came in and rightly labeled that a black-hat SEO tactic. However, link-building remains an important part of generating more traffic to your website online. By creating high-quality content and sharing it on social media, you can effectively generate your own organic link-farm. Think about it, if your content is good enough, your followers will do the work for you, sharing your links far and wide.

Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp consolidates an already gigantic social media empire. While it doesn’t necessarily change the playing field for marketers, power plays such as this demonstrate how keenly aware Facebook and its ilk are of their centrality going forward into the Internet Age.

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Velocity Agency is a digital marketing and advertising firm specializing in digital and internet marketing & advertising, print, web design, graphic design, film, and HD video promotion and post-production. Velocity serves clients all over the United States from our Metairie, LA office just outside of New Orleans by strategically implementing proprietary tools and techniques to get you the most conversions for your business through lead generation, cost-per-acquisition, and top line revenue.