Facebook. It’s where you post pics of your favorite cat, catch a cheating spouse, and look more successful than the rest of your graduating class. It’s also where businesses have created legitimate traction for their brand. This quirky social-business platform hybrid has had marketers talking for years. You’ve heard the excited chatter and either jumped aboard or turned a deaf ear.
You can’t afford to ignore Facebook’s phenomenal cosmic powers any longer. Here’s why:
Facebook already boasts startling achievements. It’s the fourth most-visited US web property. And, at 153 million visitors a year, it’s about 6x more popular than both LinkedIn and Twitter. People now spend more time of Facebook than anywhere else–Google, YouTube, Yahoo included. Facebook has stolen online advertising dollars from Yahoo and MySpace, and top talent from Microsoft and Google. Facebook’s electronic payments are anticipated to rival eBay Inc’s PayPal, and partnerships with smartphones companies are expected to give Apple and Google a run for their money.
The Facebook tidal wave has spawned headlines like:
“Facebook: Crack Cocaine Of The Internet” (Search Engine RoundTable)
“Facebook’s Growing Web of Frenemies” (Wall Street Journal)
“Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network’s Plan to Dominate the Internet–and Keep Google Out” (Wired Magazine)
And there’s no end in sight. Comparing 2009 to 2010, Facebook’s key traffic metrics are sky high across the board: unique visitors increased 38%, daily visitors increased 69%, pageviews increased 71%, time on Facebook increased 79%.
With so much market share, momentum, and innovation, one day we’ll all be sleeping under the Facebook moon, eating Facebook bananas, and brushing our teeth with Facebook paste.
No online business can afford to ignore Facebook.
More precisely–no online business can afford to ignore the Facebook audience.
(And herein lies the exciting climax).The point is not to fling together a Facebook page for your enterprise and crank out status updates every hour on the hour. It doesn’t make sense for every business to market themselves on Facebook with a Facebook page, a daily social media initiative, and a Facebook advertising campaign.
The point is to recognize that a humongous portion of visitors to every site–including yours–are Facebook users. And it makes a lot of sense to leverage that fact to your advantage. That’s when things start to get really interesting.
How do you use the massive Facebook audience to your advantage? Find out how in Facebook Innovations: Use ‘Em Or Lose.
Resources:
Facebook’s Growing Web of Frenemies (Wall Street Journal)
Facebook’s 2010 Metrics: Dominant & Still Growing (Searchengineland)
Facebook.com Generates Nearly 1 in 4 Page Views in the US (Hitwise)
