Archive for February 5, 2010

Today marks the sixth birthday of Facebook. Although the site was not the first entrant into the social media space, it certainly put the medium on the marketing map.

In all honesty, I can hardly remember the days before Facebook. What were they like…it seems as if it must have been the dark ages.  And I’m not even ad avid user of the site, but every now and then, it is good for something.

Not only did Facebook liberate us and bring the world closer together (so Facebook believes, anyway), it brought about an entirely new platform for marketers and advertisers, essentially changing the digital landscape forever.

It has, as I have said before, fundamentally changed the relationship between brands and consumers and of course, they way that consumers talk to each other.  It has allowed marketers to test human behaviour, to listen in on the conversation and sometimes, manipulate us into promoting them for free (this, by the way, isn’t a bad thing).

With over 350 million users worldwide, Facebook is well on its way to taking Yahoo’s spot as the third largest web property in the world (Google and Microsoft are No. 1 and No. 2, respectively).

Last summer Facebook took the No. 4 spot globally, displacing AOL, but according to comScore there was still an estimated 241 million unique visitors a month separating it from the No. 3 site, Yahoo. In December, 2009, that gap narrowed to 125 million unique visitors globally.

In December, 2009, Facebook attracted 469 million unique visitors, up an incredible 31 million visitors from the month before, making it the most visited website on Christmas Day.

In December alone, Facebook gained as many new visitors as Yahoo did all year. That one-month gain was also the equivalent of adding as many people as all of Digg or half of Twitter.

For the year, Facebook grew by nearly 250 million unique users. Repeating that will be difficult in 2010, but even if it slows to half that pace and Yahoo remains stagnant, Facebook could overpass Yahoo within a year to become the third largest site in the world, all without even necessarily going public.

So how can marketers captialise on these numbers?

Stephen Haines, Commercial Director at Facebook UK, recently wrote a brilliant piece on UTalkMarketing about how brands can create and update a Page’s on Facebook. He says that Facebook ads allow people to engage with ads in the same way they interact with other content on the site without leaving the page they’re viewing. For example, potential customers can directly engage with your business by clicking on the “Become a Fan” link or the “RSVP to this Event” link. In addition, this action automatically creates a story on the person’s profile page and possibly in their friends’ home page “Highlights”—generating free distribution for you. You can read more here.

And if you’re more interested in learning how to use Facebook for market research, Ray Poynter, a director at Virtual Surveys, explains that marketers can use Facebook Polling.

He told UTalkMakreting that to find out quick answers to simple questions, you can simply log in, type a simple question, specify a geographic location and a sample size, pays as little as 51 US dollars (for 100 interviews) and the results start flowing in.

These polls are clearly not going to replace U&A or ad-trackers, but they could spawn new ways of working. Traditionally, we have expected everything to be designed before the research begins, but often the basic assumptions were wrong. You can read more here.

So if you’ve not delved into the world of Facebook, now you have no excuse. Facebook is trialed and tested – and it really does work in terms of getting in the faces of consumers. It’s true, I Facebooked it.