Why Companies should be using Facebook as Part of their Marketing Mix - Part 1
Facebook has gotten so big now and such a player so quickly that I don’t think it can be ignored any longer and I personally fully intend to spend a lot more of my time developing my social media channels – especially Facebook – to balance out my online marketing mix.
A Brief overview of FaceBook
And when I say big – let’s quickly see where Facebook has come from and where it is at the moment and where it is going :
It was incorporated in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and a couple of chums at Harvard University and was initially designed for – and limited to – university students.
It has of course come on a long way since then although for quite a while, the main profile of the people on Facebook was younger people – and people with above average educations.
I suggest that you don’t become misled by that though as the demographics of Facebook have been changing very rapidly recently and it would be a mistake to assume that other demographics can’t be reached very successfully here.
Some Impressive Statistics.
This time last year, Facebook had around 250 million accounts. One year later and the number is almost twice that – i.e. getting on for half a BILLION accounts.
Now, whilst of course not all accounts are actually active, of the ones that are active, around half of them logon to Facebook every day. This means that people are spending over 500 Billion minutes per month on Facebook.
So, whilst we’re talking about statistics, I’ll quickly read off some figures I came across that may be of some interest to the more statistically oriented of you today :
Activity on Facebook
There’s more than 160 million objects that people are engaging with. Objects are pages, groups and events.
Average user :
is connected to 60 pages, groups and events, has 130 friends, creates 70 pieces of content each month.
There’s more than 25 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.
Global Reach
More than 70 translations available on the site
• About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
• Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application
Platform
• More than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
• Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications
• More than 550,000 active applications currently on Facebook Platform
• More than one million websites have integrated with Facebook Platform
• More than 150 million people engage with Facebook on external websites every month
• Two-thirds of Top U.S. 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have integrated with Facebook
Mobile
• There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
• People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
• There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products
Whilst researching this webinar, I came across the Freedman Report. Now I won’t read it out to you because I don’t think that it would be very useful.
But what I DO want to do is highlight some very important trends that the information I have just given you enables us to see.
Firstly, more people than ever before are using social media. And the way I see it Facebook is to the social media sites what Google was to the search engines.
OK – you can look at Bebo, Orkut, MySPace etc – but you might as well spend most of your time getting things sorted out for Facebook, unless you have unlimited time.
Secondly, whilst PEOPLE are using social media more, BUYERS – i.e. your customers are relying on customer reviews more than ever for their purchasing decisions.
Thirdly, recession-hit companies are looking for more efficient ways to promote their products and services.
The traditional one-way communication of advertising is becoming less and less prominent and is – quite rightly – giving way to a two way dialogue.
More people are spending time online and TV is giving ground. Not surprising when you can get as much music, video, news and other rich media content available these days – when and where you want it – that you can interact with.
If there’s an advert on the telly for cat food or a type of washing machine – you can’t interact with it. You can’t ask other people if it’s actually any good. You can’t instantly ask the manufacturer questions. You can’t click on the advert and get more details about content and specification.
Now, you take that train of thought to the average website that just has a static message- i.e. buy our stuff and you’ll see that there is a them appearing. People WANT to be able to interact and not just be sold to.
This has reached the point that customer and prospect engagement has actually become a key performance indicator that businesses are increasingly adding to their list of business metrics.
What do I mean by that? Well, smart businesses have know for a long time the importance of continually increasing the volume of their website visitors and conversion rate of visitors to sales, leads or signups.
Companies that are actively using sites like it are now measuring how many fans they have and how often they engage with the Facebook fan page – such things as posting comments or watching videos or answering polls – that kind of thing.
In a nutshell – people buy from other people and are heavily influenced by the attitudes and opinions of others. Consequently, more and more companies are using Facebook to help engage with their marketplace and encourage word of mouth marketing.
End of part 1