Facebook

Facebook is the worlds most popular social networking site. Its growth has been phenomenal by just about any measure:

  • It has over 300 million users spending on average 26 minutes per day on the site.
  • 50% of its active users log on daily
  • Each user has an average of 130 friends on the site
  • More than 55 million status updates are posted everyday
  • In the UK there are over 23 million users, 60% of whom are aged over 25.
  • 2.5 billion photos and 14 million videos are uploaded each and every month.

Not surprisingly, any site which enjoys this volume of activity presents an opportunity for organisations to promote themselves, indeed Facebook provides a number of tools to help with such promotion including:

Social Ads

These allow organisations to display small banner adverts on the facebook site. These ads can be tightly targeted based on factors such as the users age, gender, location, interests, education etc. They are also highly controllable and provide real time management information on the number of times displayed, click through rates and costs incurred.

Pages

Organisations can use pages to create the equivalent of their own mini websites within Facebook. They can incorporate images, videos, links and even stream content from the organisations own site via RSS. Facebook members can also sign up to be 'fans' of the page which can then allow them to add comments and post their own content.

Groups

These enable organisations to create their own communities within Facebook and to then interact with the community members. Some of these communities are huge, for example there are over 250,000 members of the Man Utd supporters group on Facebook.

Applications

Applications are optional add-ons that greatly enhance the user experience by offering a range of engaging functions such as competitions, reviews, messaging, service finders and on-line gaming. A number of organisations have developed applications, such as Domino pizza which allows users to store their favorite choice and so speed up ordering.

If you would like to know more about how you can use Facebook to promote your organisations, please feel free to contact us.