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The popularity of Facebook is undeniable. The site recently surpassed MySpace and boasts over 90 million members.

Over three and half years Facebook has grown from a small Harvard based college site to become the world’s largest social network.

So, what does this mean for marketers?

If you want to target broad reach online users then you need to be where the people are and it looks like the people are on Facebook.  According to Hitwise, the average Facebook session time is over 20mins and the fastest growing demographic are users over 25 years of age.

Facebook advertising options

In November 2007 Facebook launched Facebook Ads which encompasses both Social Ads campaigns and Facebook Pages.

With Social Ads there are a plethora of options,  you can target by age, gender, location or interest. You can buy ads CPM or CPC and all ads are content integrated.

With Facebook Insights you can track performance metrics for all Social Ads or Facebook Pages campaigns and see who is interacting with your brand.  Insights can even show you the viral distribution rate of newsfeed stories about your business or brand.

Facebook Social Ads Example

Facebook Pages

The best thing about Facebook Pages is that they’re free!  Anyone can quickly and easily set one up.

Facebook Pages, Ferrari

If you search for your brand on the site you may find fan pages that have already been created by users for your business - Facebook Pages gives you a legitimate way to interact with these fans through the site.

Things to think about if you’re considering using Facebook Pages:

The successful management of a business Facebook Page can be very time consuming!  This means…

• You need to have a content plan in action to ensure that you’re uploading fresh content to your Facebook Page regularly.
• You will likely need to dedicate a team member to manage your day to day Facebook presence.
• To harness the power of Facebook you should have a clear understanding of how your presence integrates into the rest of your marketing efforts.  Including how it fits into your overall communications plan and PR disaster recovery plan.  Your Facebook Page needs to be considered an important vehicle in communicating with your customers.

Facebook Beacon

I think Facebook Beacon is the most powerful tool that Facebook can offer.  Beacon allows Facebook users to share their actions on other websites with their Facebook friends.

Here’s an example of how it works.

Recently I saved a recipe to my recipe box on Epicurious and a box popped up to tell me that Epicurious was sending this information to my Facebook profile and also gave me a ‘no thanks’ option to opt out.

Epicurios using Facebook Beacon

Next time I logged in to Facebook there was also an alert to let me know that Epicurious was sending info to my profile and giving me useful options such as ‘Remove’, ‘Okay’ and ‘Always publish stories sent to my profile from this site’.   Being upfront and telling users exactly what is happening is of utmost importance in any online transaction like this and I think Beacon does this very well.

Facebook Beacon Alert

So as the example above shows, all of my friends now know that I like to use Epicurious AND that Epicurious has Cajun Chicken recipes AND they can probably deduct that this is a food related recipe site AND that the site allows you to save recipes to a queue.  If any of my friends are wondering what to have for dinner tonight, they may just pop along to Epicurious and take a look…

This is simple old fashioned word of mouth promotion at its best.

Note: There is some controversy surrounding privacy and the use of Facebook Beacon.

Tags: Facebook, Facebook Advertising, Social ads, Social Media, Social Networks

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 10th, 2008 at 3:22 pm and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.