Facebook Advertising | Social Media Marketing

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.

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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)