Facebook is a social networking website, founded by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg in 2004.
Like MySpace and Bebo, it enables internet users to list their personal details on the internet and communicate with other people through the site. Unlike other social networking sites, however, users’ profiles are not open to view from anyone outside your friends, their contacts and networks or groups you have joined.
As of February 2007, the website had the largest number of registered users among college-focused sites with over 25 million members worldwide.
Facebook is the number one site for photos in the United States, ahead of public sites such as Flickr, with over 6 million photos uploaded daily. It is also the sixth most visited site in the United States. In September 2006 the number of UK Facebook users was just 200,000. By March 2007 1.3million of us had signed up.
In the UK many of these users are College or University students, with a cut off age of around 26.
However, when I registered, I delved a little deeper and found people listed from my Alma Mater at UBC in Vancouver from when I was there in 1976! (For those of you who are afraid to do the maths – that’s means they were over 50!). So I believe it’s just a matter of time before the site expands its age and groups frontiers.
What makes Facebook and other social network sites like it so exciting for marketers, is that people are defining their own groups which we can then target, and either sponsor from the outside with skyscrapers or flyers or join in and contribute with shared comments and photos.
I saw a great example of Facebook social marketing in April with a two step approach to managing a viral campaign. First we saw the “Otters Holding Hands” video on YouTube, strategically placed there by Vancouver Aquarium.
At the time it had clocked up 2.5M views (currently on 6.3M). Then my 25 year old son pointed out a virtual gift available on Facebook … you guessed it “Otters holding hands”.
The idea was that you would buy a “Virtual Gift” for $1 and give it to a friend of yours on Facebook. The Facebook gift would then contain a link to the YouTube video….. and the promotion would be delivered. Fantastic!
Since then however, the virtual gift idea has had some critics and I’m not sure of its status.
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In the past few weeks, the Facebook team have also opened up a Marketplace on the site so the commercial routes to market are becoming more transparent with people selling houses, jobs and other stuff directly from their home pages.
So the long and short of it is that I must get a profile on Facebook, join in or create a few groups so that I can understand its potential and recommend it now or in the future to aging marketing directors all of whom will probably be over the age of 25!
