Selling to the Future (Part 3 of 5): Facebook is life for college students and beyond

By Christina | Posted June 30, 2008 | 0 Comment(s) | Filed in: Internet Marketing

(Part 3 of a 5-part blog series on Selling to the Future)

Supporting the instinctive trait of gathering in groups, Facebook is a social utility and virtual society complete with social hierarchy, friendship, competition, and user-generated online groups, events and applications.

To a marketer, it’s a demographically and psychographically obvious place to target efforts.

Facebook also has more than 600 million searches per month making it one of the top 20 search engines.

According to a January 2008 HubSpot.com webinar, “Facebook for Businesses,” Facebook has more than 59 million active users, averaging 250,000 new users each day since January 2007. More than half are out of college with the fastest growing demographic 25 or older. More than half of active users return daily.

Business Uses for Facebook

Create a profile, recruit friends
Create a business group, recruit fans
Use News feeds to make announcements, show activity, gain friends/fans
Buy Facebook social ads
Conduct Facebooks polls
Participate in the Marketplace
Schedule and promote events, invite attendees
Build your profile and make connections with consumers
Viral marketing, generating traffic and creating links

Facebook Marketing

Facebook has a virtual shop of graphic gifts to purchase and send to friends. Companies have harnessed this gift-giving power to promote brands, Website products, events, film and TV releases and more, usually offering free gifts as opposed to the typical $1 cost.

This prom season, Sears used Facebook for friends to share fashions and recreate the dress shopping experience online. Sears supported the effort to recreate the mall experience for today’s social networking teen through Facebook ads and retail signage. Click here for full article.

According to an article on The Baby Boomer Entrepreneur Website, 41 percent of the teens that use MySpace, Facebook or other social network sites say they send messages to friends via those sites every day.

The first step is to visit the site and build from there. The very life of your future Internet marketing strategy may depend on it.

Social Networking Continued

Facebook is currently the number two social networking site behind MySpace, but the landscape of social networking is constantly evolving and segmenting. Google has recently entered the ring with its beta “Friend Connect,” which lets the sites of musicians, political campaigns and others incorporate profile data from several social networks. And you can’t overlook the wildly popular, and recently $1 billion valuated, LinkedIn for professionals social networking site. Plus, Ning allows you to create your own free social network!

Keep a pulse on what’s next in social networking and who’s ahead in the fight for top social status.

Sources: Facebook.com, Hubspot.com, Thebabyboomerentreprenuer.com, retailmarketingblog.com, Wikipedia.com, Google.com

Part 1 - Connect to convert

Part 2 - Learn your XYZs

Part 3 - Facebook is life for college students and beyond

Part 4 - Blogging in business (coming soon)

Part 5 - Don't call us, we'll text u (coming soon)