Facebook Advertising | Social Media Marketing

Michael Jackson died last Thursday in his home in Los Angeles 25th June 2009. The 50-year-old musical genius was preparing for what would have been a series of 50 mega concerts starting July 13 in London. He was the most talented and the most kind musician that ever lived. We will miss him dearly. Michael Jackson will live forever in his music.
…and apparently on Facebook as well. There are 495 personal Michael Jackson accounts on Facebook. Most of them are named Michael Jackson or Mike Jackson. None of these are the most famous Michael Jackson though. The King of Pop is represented by over 540 Fan Pages and 548 Groups containing millions of people. There are also 323 Michael Jackson applications and over 500 Michael Jackson-events. The five biggest Michael Jackson Fan Pages have over 7.5 million fans and the six biggest Michael Jackson Groups have about 400,000 members. Judging by these figures there is no doubt that Michael Jackson will become immortal and take his place alongside Elvis and Marilyn Monroe who have over 600 Fan Pages and over 1000 Groups (combined) on Facebook. Long live the King and the King of Pop!

The number of customers using Facebook’s online-advertising system has more than tripled in the past 12 months. This means that more and more small- and medium- sized businesses are now using Facebook as part of their online marketing strategy. Lots of local businesses are now finding success in this advertising model. Facebook launched its advertising program in 2007.

The ads, which appear on users’ Facebook profile pages (wall, info, photos etc.) allow 25 characters in the title and as many as 135 characters in the body of the text plus an optional photo. The targeting behind the ads is driven by the personal profiles of Facebook users. If you list Simpsons as your favourite TV-show, you will probably see an ad from Foxtel sooner or later.

Wired’s Fred Vogelstein thinks that Facebook is poised to take over display advertising the way that Google has dominated search advertising. Internet users behave differently on Facebook than anywhere else online. Most of them use their real names, connect with their real friends, share their real thoughts, tastes and news. This is what makes Facebook audience so appealing to advertisers. You have real people with personal qualities who can be divided into exact consumer categories. Google, Yahoo and other search engines, on the other hand know little about of its users other than their search histories and some browsing activity.

Doubling its membership in March, Twitter is growing even faster than Facebook. As you might remember, at the end of last year, Facebook tried to buy Twitter for $500M but failed miserably. If Facebook had secured Twitter’s huge stake on the real time user generated information, they could have secured the dominant position in user generated live content. More and more Internet users are transferring their social habits to Twitter and Facebook from sites like Friendster and MySpace. In May this year, Facebook surpassed MySpace in the US, which was the last strong hold for the News Corp owned site. According Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg Facebook’s revenue may climb 70 percent this year. Also last month, Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies paid $200 million for less than 2 percent of Facebook, valuing the company at $10 billion. Earlier Microsoft had secured a 1.6% stake for $240 million.

Facebook is based in Palo Alto, California. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. Wired is a monthly magazine published since March 1993. Wired reports on how technology affects culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast Publications, it is published in San Francisco, California.

Last Saturday at 1 minute past midnight Facebook launched the long awaited Facebook usernames to the general public. So far only famous people and celebrities, like good old  Britney Spears here have been able to enjoy their personalised Facebook names. The public interest was huge, so there were worries how the Facebook servers could cope with the high demand. Everything went smoothly though, which is a huge bonus to the Facebook back end guys.

Here are some signicant figures from the launch day. In the first three minutes over 200,000 usernames were registered. That is an amazing 1000+ per second during the first minutes of the release. After fifteen minutes, users had secured about half a million vanity URL’s. Within one hour, over 1 million Facebook usernames had been claimed. That’s an average of 279 usernames per minute. So far over 4 million usernames have been taken.

Did I get mine? Well, of course I did and I hope you secured your’s as well. I think www.facebook.com/krisolin is far better than the old and  cumbersome www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=697888240. Please leave us a comment and let us know what name you got registered.

Google has announced that its new real-time communication platform, Google Wave will be launched to the public later this year. This will be Google’s biggest product launch in their recent online history.

Google Wave is designed to be a real-time communication platform. It combines email, social networking, instant messaging (IM), wikis, online chats and project management all built into one web application. Google Wave is actually designed to replace email, instant messaging (IM), blogs and wikis. It is also build to be a collaboration tool whereas FaceBook is not build to be a collaboration tool at all, although you could use it as such if you know your way around it. So, in this aspect FaceBook is just a glorified IM platform- to put it bluntly.

Here are some of Google Wave’s features:

• You can see what someone else is typing in real time.
• Third party developers can build their own applications within Google Wave, just like in Facebook and iGoogle.
• Waves (Google Wave posts) can be embedded on other blogs or websites.
• What ever you write in a Google Wave can be edited by everyone else. This gives also you the opprotunity to correct or append information submitted by other people;  you can also add comments within conversations.
• The Google Wave code will be open source.
• Easy Drag-and-drop file sharing. You don’t need attachments; just drop your files into Google Wave and everyone will have access to them.
• Waves can be playbacked.
• Spelling autocorrection.
• Auto-translation on-the-fly.

Facebook personal (or vanity) URL’s are coming soon! Facebook vanity URL is a more personal Facebook web address than the current one they offer. At the moment some priviledged (read=famous) Facebook users are already enjoying their own vanity url’s. Some good examples are the president of the United States, Microsoft, the musician Sting and the most famous TV-cartoon Simpsons.

Here is a top 10 list of famous Facebook users with their own names (not in any particular ranking order):

1. http://www.facebook.com/u2
2. http://www.facebook.com/barackobama
3. http://www.facebook.com/oprahwinfreyshow
4. http://www.facebook.com/Microsoft
5. http://www.facebook.com/sting
6. http://www.facebook.com/markzuckerberg (duh…)
7. http://www.facebook.com/coldplay
8. http://www.facebook.com/eBay
9. http://www.facebook.com/redcross
10. http://www.facebook.com/TheSimpsons

Luckily for the rest of us Facebook will soon be allowing all users to claim their personal, or vanity URL pointing to their profile page. For instance at the moment www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=697888240 is me, but next week it could be something like www.facebook.com/KrisOlin, which would be much easier to remember and use. No to mention the advantages for SEO purposes for famous people and companies. Google, buy the way, does not have their own Facebook URL. Hmmm? Facebook has recently asked their users if they would pay for a vanity URL. The results are not yet published, so at the moment we don’t know if  they plan on charging for them or not. In all likelihood personal names will be free, but busines names might incur a cost; possibly much the same way as paying for your domain name, for which you pay a yearly fee to the registry. This is the official, most recent comment from Facebook about the matter:

“Unfortunately we are not currently able to approve requests for vanity URLs. The only Pages that presently have vanity URLs are bands and businesses that partnered with us for the initial launch of this new product. We hope to make these URLs available for everyone to have on their individual Page(s) in the future.”

Well, the future seems to be now, since they have plans to make an official announcement no later than next week. The rules will prohibit trademark infringement and a lots of words will be blacklisted, such as generic terms and phrases. But for the most part, users should be able to grab a name that they want.

Vanity URL’s have proven to be a very powerful tool on other social networking sites such as MySpace and Twitter. It’s not just that users like them but it makes telling people your online profile name easier as well. People have also long used MySpace URL’s as their main online identity, even instead of a website. Twitter, more recently, has started to become the online identity provider of choice. It’s no wonder Facebook wants to enter this game now.

When the personal  URL’s  are available, you can with get more instructions from the horse’s mouth: http://www.facebook.com/help.php

Kris Olin
Web Designer | Internet Promotion Strategist
Msc (marketing)
http://twitter.com/KrisOlin (in the meantime)

Facebook and Twitter have become important tools for brand building and -maintenance for companies and public figures.

McDonalds has over 300.000 Facebook fans and Lacoste and Lacoste Bags have over 2500 followers on Twitter and close to a million fans on Facebook. Karl Lagerfeld has more than 21.000 followers on Twitter which is quite suprising since he’s following back none.  The basic rule on Twitter and other social medias is that when someone becomes your fan or starts following you, you should return the favour. Obviously Karl is so cool (see pic) that he can bend this rule. Generally for a commercial entity it is not a good idea to show disrespect and not to be interested in your fans or followers. Chanel has collected 45.000 fans on Facebook so far, however they missed out on Twitter. The most popular Chanel is ‘chanelwestcoast’ aka c.c. who is a 20 years old “Rapping Receptionist” from Los Angeles with over 18.000 followers.

There are over 9 million visitors on Twitter every month, while Facebook has more than 200 million users worldwide. These sites are serious sites to be at when you are a marketer or advertiser reliant on individual people to buy your stuff.

At first you might think that Facebook is just one more social networking site and Twitter is just a crazy, 140 character micro-blogging platform, but marketing professionals have for some time recognised the capabilities these tools offer for branding and customer loyalty.  One of the key advantages to using social medias for a brand is the engagement with your fans and hence, consumers. You are able to create an important link between your product and your consumer. If you searched “Coca Cola” on Twitter you would have found out that a Spanish guy was drinking Coke with his Doritos 9 minutes ago. Do you think that would be interesting news for the marketing department of the Coca Cola Company? We’ll, it should be. Suprisingly Coca Cola does not have a Twitter presence, however they do have 3.5 million fans on Facebook. Pepsi on the other hand has close to 3000 followers and they even have official Pepsi Max Finland up there! I think I’ll just follow both of them since Pepsi must be the coolest cola drink out there at the moment.

Here’s my advice to all you marketers who are targeting your products or services direct to individual consumers: lock in your Facebook and Twitter names as soon as possible. Don’t think about it, just do it. Later on, when you actually realise the importance of this, it is quite unpleasant to find out that someone else (perhaps even your competitor) has beaten you to it.

Kris Olin
Web Designer | Internet Promotion Strategist
Msc (marketing)
http://twitter.com/KrisOlin

Facebook is the most popular social networking site in the world. It is one of the greatest applications alongside Twitter and MSN Live Messenger to keep up with your friends.  But did you know that you can use Facebook effectively to promote your products and/or services as well? Facebook is also an execellent vehicle to create or reinforce brand awareness.

Here are two effective methods you can use Facebook for business purposes:

1. Facebook Ads. Advertising your products or services with Facebook Ads you can reach upto 200 million active Facebook users. These advertisements are the small ads you see on the right hand side of your profile page. For some reason I tend to get a lot of beer ads (?). As a marketer you can advertise to your potential audience by using their age, gender, location or personal interests as a targeting factor.  You also can target people with specific keywords they have written in their profiles. This type of advertising is one of the most targeted marketing vehicles in the world! There are very few competing medias where you can use so many specific factors as how to reach your audience.

2. Fan pages. Another way of advertising on Facebook is creating a fan page about your product or service. A lot of rock bands use this method very effectively. For instance, a great Finnish Goth Rock band Nightwish have over 250,000 fans! Do you think you could do some serious marketing to that audience? Yes, you could! You can start discussions, post photos and write announcements on your page for your fans to see. You can also send official updates to all of your fans, or just a segment of your fans who, say, are female and live in Sydney Australia. (Image by Andy Warhol.)

Facebook has launched its new, updated Marketplace.  Facebook Marketplace is a space where users can sell their unwanted stuff.  This time the Marketplace is powered by a company with a funny name, Oodle. Despite the name they are a big online classifieds company founded by former Excite and eBay executives. Since its launch in 2005, Oodle has grown rapidly and now gets over four million unique visitors each month. Oodle is privately owner and their headquarters is in San Mateo, California.

Facebook first introduced the Marketplace application in mid 2007 as a way for people to post classified listings on the site. The idea was great, but the execution was not so.  Facebook realised this and therefore late 2008, Facebook turned to Oodle for its expertise in online classifieds. Oodle has built a completely new version of the Marketplace focused on giving people a place to buy, sell or give things away to the people they know. Only time will tell wether this incarnation is better or …worse.

If you have already tried the new Facebook Marketplace, I would love to hear your comments and views. Just click the comment hotlink at the top right corner of this post.

If you want to learn how to sell your stuff on the new Facebook Marketplace effectively, please feel free to download my free Guide > > > .

As we speculated last month, Facebook is about to hand over its official classifieds listings to a partner, and that partner is Oodle, we have been able to confirm. An announcement may be made as early as tomorrow.

What is interesting about this deal is that Oodle already powers the classifieds on MySpace. Even though Facebook and MySpace are archrivals, this makes sense because in classifieds scale matters. The more listings and the more people seeing those listings, the better.

Classifieds so far have failed on Facebook because they have not been reengineered to be more social. Oodle should take a look at iList, which tries to make listings go viral by letting friends promote your listings for you.

By becoming the preferred classifieds partner, Oodle’s app would be promoted by Facebook in return for a cut of revenues generated by listing fees and the like. Facebook is also looking for a partner to ru