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TLTR
StopHateForProfit is a dissent movement that involves halting advertising investments on the platforms of the Facebook family. Whether you agree with the protest or not, a business should never rely solely on one channel, and it’s essential to know the alternative channels to include and experiment with.
General Introduction
New forms of protest no longer occur in the streets but in digital spaces. This is the case with #StopHateForProfit, a dissent movement that involves halting advertising investments on the platforms of the Facebook family.
To grasp the significance of this movement, consider that companies of the caliber of Patagonia, North Face, and Ben & Jerry’s have already joined by suspending their planned investments for the month of July. Coca Cola and Starbucks have also announced plans to boycott Facebook, followed by Adidas, Ford, and Microsoft.
Why? The straw that broke the camel’s back was Mark Zuckerberg’s decision not to take a stance on some controversial posts by American President Donald Trump regarding the protests following George Floyd’s death.
The request is quite simple: a concrete commitment and greater accountability in managing racist, discriminatory, and hate-inciting content that has been circulating freely on the platform for years.
Even here at Antartika, in our own small way, we’ve decided to take a stance and halt our campaigns on the Facebook Family’s social networks for the month of July.
In any case, beyond the protest, it’s always better not to put all your eggs in one basket, as the saying goes. For a business, concentrating its strategy on a single channel is never a good thing.
For these reasons, we’ve decided to provide some inspiration to evaluate alternative tools to Facebook.
Editorial Plan without Sponsorships
It might sound paradoxical, but it’s still possible to use Facebook and Instagram to share your content without making Zuckerberg breathe a sigh of relief.
These famous social networks are primarily advertising platforms and, consequently, profit from advertising investments.
Organic posting could still be a way to take a stance: share that you’re supporting the #StopHateForProfit protest and consider shifting your advertising budget to other platforms.
Google Ads
Google Ads is one of the best alternatives to Facebook in the advertising field. Google processes 4.5 billion search queries per day, which is 70,000 search queries per second.
You can create ads on the Search Network or the Display Network, which consists of over two million websites, videos, and apps.
Using Google Ads offers many advantages, such as:
- Advanced targeting
- Budget control
- High measurability
- Quick results
- Remarketing tools
If you want to learn more about Google Ads, you can take a look at our guide.
To support pay-per-click campaigns, it’s interesting to include an SEO strategy.
Search Engine Optimization activities are geared toward the long term, so it’s not feasible to replace an advertising activity solely in this manner. However, the combination of SEO and PPC tactics can bring various benefits, such as increased brand search volume.
YouTube
YouTube is Google’s most popular service, with videos recording over a billion hours watched per day. It’s an excellent channel for brand awareness. Advertising on YouTube can also be done through Google Ads. There are various advertising formats available on YouTube that allow for creativity in messaging and content.
Recently, YouTube announced that it’s working on creating new analytics dashboards to help creators gain more information about the origin of views and how they can improve their content’s performance.
Email Marketing
Email marketing allows for more direct cultivation of customer relationships compared to social networks. Although you need permission from users, email marketing has significant advantages, such as:
- Personalization: You can create specific and engaging content for different audience segments based on how they’ve interacted with your brand in the past.
- Testing: You can perform A/B tests to find out which types of titles and content work best.
- Ownership: It’s a channel entirely yours, where you can retain and update data. It’s not subject to algorithm changes that could affect your plans.
But the winning strength is that no one can beat the ROI of email marketing. According to studies by DMA and Demand Metric, the average return on investment (ROI) for email marketing is 122%, which is over 4 times higher than other marketing formats, including social media, direct mail, and paid search.
So, do we have to say goodbye to the world of social media? Absolutely not! Facebook hasn’t devoured all existing platforms (fortunately), and often many other channels’ fame is overshadowed by the industry giants.
One such example is Pinterest, a sort of image search engine. Users can collect images from their feed or save them directly from the web into personalized collections (boards), categorized by topics. But you can also like images or share them externally through other channels.
Pinterest is the ideal place to gather inspirations: from recipes to home decorations, from workouts to design, you can find themes and images for all tastes.
It’s a way to make your brand known, even organically: about 93% of pinners (Pinterest users) say they’ve become aware of and come into contact with new brands through this platform and often use it to plan their purchases.
TikTok
This isn’t the first time we’re saying it: the former Musical.ly is not just a passing trend but a channel that will become increasingly important, especially for brands with a fairly young target audience.
TikTok is incredibly appealing to the new generations that can engage in creating original, fun, and light-hearted videos, from dances and sketches to imitations, social challenges, and background songs (whose usage rights are acquired by the Bytedance group).
If your products or services can be presented in an entertainment-oriented perspective, TikTok could be right for you.
If your industry is more related to the B2B world, LinkedIn remains the comfort-social par excellence.
LinkedIn ads have prohibitive costs compared to the platforms we’re used to, but it’s also possible to work very well organically: the strength of the social network comes from the network of contacts.
A post or article on LinkedIn “comes back to life” whenever someone interacts with it. The publication date doesn’t matter: from the moment one of our contacts comments on or recommends content, it will reappear in the news feed, making it visible again.
Each content, therefore, is a long-term investment, and this opportunity comes at a high cost on social networks like Facebook and Instagram. For this reason, it’s advisable to have many contacts and involve colleagues and employees in managing the Company Page to achieve excellent results.
Although the little blue bird hasn’t exactly taken Italy by storm, Twitter is actually a social networks titan with over 330 million active monthly users, of which 80% are what the platform itself defines as “affluent millennials.”
Unlike Facebook, communication is less about sharing content with friends and acquaintances and more about the rapid dissemination of information. Your tweet (message) aims to be read by as many people as possible.
Despite this, the tweet is very suitable for a one-to-one conversation, and for this reason, it’s often used by companies to stay in touch with their customers and obtain valuable information from them, such as their moods and needs.
Twitter’s advertising campaigns are highly customizable: you can choose the campaign’s goal and target the audience of interest based on factors like location, gender, age, behaviors, and profiles they follow.
Twitter charges advertisers in various ways, depending on the campaign’s goal. For example, if you’re trying to increase your website’s traffic, a pay-per-click system is used, while for videos, the charging mechanism is – plot twist! – pay per view.
In Conclusion
#StopHateForProfit is a beautiful initiative that demonstrates that today, more than ever, brands are held responsible for their actions and even their lack of taking a stance. And Facebook is not exempt.
In addition to this, it’s important to remember that an online strategy shouldn’t exclude channels or be present on a single platform. Goals and data should guide our choices within a strategic plan. Only in this way can we understand how each channel can contribute to achieving results.
Once again, diversity is a form of wealth.
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