Apple Inc. (Felix Chen)

                Apple Inc. is currently one of the biggest producers of consumer products. Its products like the iPhone, Macbook, iPad, and iPod are extremely popular worldwide, and deservedly so as their designs are innovative and aesthetically amazing. So when one looks at Apple’s Facebook page, one would expect it to be as equally impressive as its success with their products right? Think again. Apple’s Facebook page has no redeeming qualities about it whatsoever. Through the lack of the features we talked about in class that make up good and attractive social media content, it will become quite apparent how Apple has failed miserably in social media marketing via Facebook.

                Let’s first look at what is exactly on this page. The entire page has only a few things worth mentioning. The profile picture, which is just its logo, is trivial. There is no cover photo, and the description only contains “Computers & Electronics” and the company address. The total number of people who like this page since its creation is shown, as well as the number of likes and visits Apple has received this month. On the right, your friends that like or were physically present at Apple are also depicted. Finally, there is a recommendations section which basically allows users to post any thoughts on Apple’s wall. This is just completely awful. There are no premiums for one. Apple would greatly benefit if it announced that they were giving away free things such as iPod Shuffles. There is no sense of participation with the users. Apple should be hosting more events, surveys, games to involve the users, such as polls asking which iPhone generation was the best. User-generated content could be very useful as well: Apple could have submit their ideas for a new product and let others be able to view them. The customer-service “portal” is basically the recommendations section, but it is actually hurting the company’s image because there is a lot of negative feedback on their products ironically. As for content flow, there is not even a trace of any sort of news concerning the company or the product. Because of how terrible this Facebook page is, I am inclined to think that this is not Apple’s official Facebook page. However, this is the page with the most likes at 7.9 million, and none of the other pages in the search seem to be much better in terms of the features mentioned. This still does not take away from the fact that Apple’s social media marketing is extremely bad as Facebook is one of, if not the, biggest social media platform. Apple should either make an official Facebook page with all of the features we went over in class, or delete the unofficial pages on Facebook right now because they are actually hurting the software giant’s image in that people continually bash their products by posting negative feedback.