With the rise of web 2.0, social networking sites flooded the web battling to become the most popular – especially with the advent of the $580 million MySpace acquisition by News Corp. Among the sea of these social networking sites, one stood out, and it was Facebook.
About Facebook
Facebook was founded by a young Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg. It started out small, allowing only the students of Harvard College to join the network which would allow the undergraduates to communicate with their friends, meet new people and exchange information. Within two months, it spread to all the colleges around the vicinity of Boston and all the Ivy League schools and soon after, to all universities. On September 11th 2006, Facebook decided that they would let anyone join their network, as long as they were of a certain age, and participate in networks that were categorized by school, work or geographical locations. This opened the doors for an even more rapid rate of expansion for the social networking website that no one had expected to become one of the most valuable entities online today.
Since then, it has expanded to become the 7th most visited site the world with 42 million active international members and has even beaten photo giant Flickr as the leading website for photos – a huge sign of its success seeing that Facebook did not even target the online photograph market.
Basically, people join Facebook to network with their friends and advertise themselves to let others know about them even more, a huge trend that has been on the rise recently along with the Web 2.0 era.
We will talk about why Facebook has become such a huge phenomenon in marketing, and why it has such a huge potential that justifies the founder’s billion-dollar asking price.
Marketing in Facebook
What if you could reach your target group and even have these people promote your products virally to others that are outside that group?
What if you wanted to advertise your product or service to a very targeted group of people who voluntarily tell you their interests?
The way Facebook categorizes their members by geographical location and the features they have for communication allow you to do just that and it has opened many doors for marketers. You can easily create an account, upload photos of a pretty person that anyone would accept as their friend and use the system to craft messages that will squeeze out information that you need from your target market. There are morality issues with this technique but it does the job.
Even though Facebook is an internet-based system, the marketing aspect of it succeeds very well for offline events such as local parties and festivals due to the crowd that it targets that is referred to as the tech-savvy youth audience. An event that is advertised on Facebook is spread at alarming rates, since it appears on the pages of everyone that attends which gets even more people to attend – this is simply pure viral beauty.
Another great way Facebook allows marketing is via the groups system they have, which brings together people of common interest. The tech-savvy crowd create groups such as the Apple Students group, which you can easily advertise certain products such as iPod accessories to, since you already know what they want. You simply need to find the right group and hook up the Facebook advertising function to target the crowd you want.
In Facebook, the people you advertise to can even become your billboards, helping you advertise your product or service. As you may or may not know know, Word-of-mouth is among the strongest, if not the strongest form of marketing as it immediately gets the prospect to trust you without you having to do any pitching. Combined with the viral nature of Facebook, it is about the best you can get. When you advertise yourself and someone puts it on their notes page, it will appear on every single one of their friends’ news feeds and it goes viral.
What’s impressive is that Facebook’s retention rate is unreal, with 60% logging in daily and 85% once a week, so you know that when you advertise, it’s not just to a bunch of dead accounts. These people spend quite a substantial of time surfing the website as well – an average of 19 minutes a day. Facebook accounts for 1% of all the time spent on the internet, so you know that you’re missing out when you do not put in any effort to market your business there.
Facebook is yet another way the internet demonstrates its fascinating ability to advertise with extreme precision at very low costs – something that was not even possible before.
There are many marketing possibilities for you to explore in Facebook, and it is something I would urge you to exploit if you can.
Discuss Add this link to... Bury
About Facebook
Facebook was founded by a young Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg. It started out small, allowing only the students of Harvard College to join the network which would allow the undergraduates to communicate with their friends, meet new people and exchange information. Within two months, it spread to all the colleges around the vicinity of Boston and all the Ivy League schools and soon after, to all universities. On September 11th 2006, Facebook decided that they would let anyone join their network, as long as they were of a certain age, and participate in networks that were categorized by school, work or geographical locations. This opened the doors for an even more rapid rate of expansion for the social networking website that no one had expected to become one of the most valuable entities online today.
Since then, it has expanded to become the 7th most visited site the world with 42 million active international members and has even beaten photo giant Flickr as the leading website for photos – a huge sign of its success seeing that Facebook did not even target the online photograph market.
Basically, people join Facebook to network with their friends and advertise themselves to let others know about them even more, a huge trend that has been on the rise recently along with the Web 2.0 era.
We will talk about why Facebook has become such a huge phenomenon in marketing, and why it has such a huge potential that justifies the founder’s billion-dollar asking price.
Marketing in Facebook
What if you could reach your target group and even have these people promote your products virally to others that are outside that group?
What if you wanted to advertise your product or service to a very targeted group of people who voluntarily tell you their interests?
The way Facebook categorizes their members by geographical location and the features they have for communication allow you to do just that and it has opened many doors for marketers. You can easily create an account, upload photos of a pretty person that anyone would accept as their friend and use the system to craft messages that will squeeze out information that you need from your target market. There are morality issues with this technique but it does the job.
Even though Facebook is an internet-based system, the marketing aspect of it succeeds very well for offline events such as local parties and festivals due to the crowd that it targets that is referred to as the tech-savvy youth audience. An event that is advertised on Facebook is spread at alarming rates, since it appears on the pages of everyone that attends which gets even more people to attend – this is simply pure viral beauty.
Another great way Facebook allows marketing is via the groups system they have, which brings together people of common interest. The tech-savvy crowd create groups such as the Apple Students group, which you can easily advertise certain products such as iPod accessories to, since you already know what they want. You simply need to find the right group and hook up the Facebook advertising function to target the crowd you want.
In Facebook, the people you advertise to can even become your billboards, helping you advertise your product or service. As you may or may not know know, Word-of-mouth is among the strongest, if not the strongest form of marketing as it immediately gets the prospect to trust you without you having to do any pitching. Combined with the viral nature of Facebook, it is about the best you can get. When you advertise yourself and someone puts it on their notes page, it will appear on every single one of their friends’ news feeds and it goes viral.
What’s impressive is that Facebook’s retention rate is unreal, with 60% logging in daily and 85% once a week, so you know that when you advertise, it’s not just to a bunch of dead accounts. These people spend quite a substantial of time surfing the website as well – an average of 19 minutes a day. Facebook accounts for 1% of all the time spent on the internet, so you know that you’re missing out when you do not put in any effort to market your business there.
Facebook is yet another way the internet demonstrates its fascinating ability to advertise with extreme precision at very low costs – something that was not even possible before.
There are many marketing possibilities for you to explore in Facebook, and it is something I would urge you to exploit if you can.
Discuss Add this link to... Bury
LinksMarker is a Web 2.0 content management system
Comments