How Libra Will Change Social Media Marketing

Mark Zuckerberg has already changed the way we market. The rise of Facebook, with its mixture of detailed personal demographics and ongoing engagement, has forced marketers to create new ways of building relationships with leads and customers. As the platform has grown, we’ve all grown used to creating posts, producing videos, broadcasting live, answering questions, and carefully targeting ads. The launch of Libra could change social media marketing.

The new cryptocurrency called Libra.

The new cryptocurrency, managed by an independent association but closely associated with Facebook, aims to provide an easy way to make online transactions. Instead of using a currency controlled by a national bank and limited by national boundaries, anyone anywhere will be able to buy or sell goods using the genuinely international currency.

A basket of fiat currencies will give Libra stability, avoiding the volatility problems that have hindered the use of Bitcoin. The result should be smooth, reliable transactions for Internet-based customers who won’t need to enter credit card details or pay third-parties like PayPal.

Libra taking-off as planned; results for marketers a whole new world.

One of the biggest challenges for social media marketers has been the difficulty of assigning causation. We can see how far a piece of content reaches. We can measure its level of engagement. We can track how much traffic a post or an ad drives to a website.

But it’s much harder to measure the amount of revenue any piece of content produces. We know we’re building engagement, but we can’t always tell the depth of that engagement or how much it’s worth to the business.

That’s what Libra can change. By allowing people to hit a Buy button that will take their money immediately. Social media marketing will acquire a whole new action—and marketers will be able to add a new metric to their statistics.

Actions on behavior.

The quick action will affect behavior. Some marketers will focus solely on the number of sales a post generates. They’ll experiment with different content forms to generate maximum conversions. They’ll worry less about engagement and audience retention and more about the amount of money a post produces immediately.

Producers of live video, currently a critical engagement tool often used for product demos and Q&As, may find that it pays to keep broadcasting. They can turn their live videos into something that looks a lot like a shopping channel, with sales coming in as they talk.

The smartest marketers will find that the addition of an instant Buy button doesn’t take away from social media marketing.

• They’ll combine those benefits to produce new kinds of funnels.
• Some posts will introduce the brand to new markets.
• Other posts will promote the benefits of the brand and its products.
• Finally, at the end of the funnel, social media marketers will be able to use Libra’s new functionality to turn those previous efforts into cash.

All of this will require a new way of thinking about social media marketing.

• It will require new sales strategies and new kinds of messages.
• The exact forms those messages will take will only become clear as Libra takes off, and marketers experiment.
• We can expect to see plenty of failed hard sales efforts before smart marketers hit on a combination of engagement and call to action that produces the best results.
• We can also expect that Facebook marketing will become less about branding and engagement and more about conversions.

But whether Libra will be successful and trigger this change is even harder to predict than the form of the new social media marketing itself.

“Libra Cryptocurrency Gold Coin by Facebook” by orgalpari is licensed under CC BY 2.0