Facebook Advertising | Social Media Marketing

Facebook’s CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg annouces that the social network he started in 2004 has now reached 350 million users.

Zuckerberg also said that Facebook will be removing their regional networks. Facebook’s current privacy model revolves around networks which works well for smaller groups of people. However,  some of the regional networks, like India and China have now millions of members and this is no longer the best way to control the privacy issues of users. About 50 percent of all Facebook users belong to some regional network. Facebook will be adding features that many users have already asked for; for instance the ability to control who sees the content you create or upload. In addition, the privacy settings page will be made simpler by combining some settings. This is actually a very good upgrade as their privacy settings are quite a mess. So the next Facebook update will remove the current regional networks and create some new privacy features.  In the next couple of weeks Facebook will ask users to review and update their privacy settings.  Facebook will suggest settings for users based on their current level of privacy, but the best way to do this is to customise them yourself.

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Facebook was launched five years ago on February 4^th in 2004. Its founder, Mark Zuckerberg launched the Facebook as an experimental social network exclusively for Harvard University students. It was a huge hit right from the beginning. The current board members are Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, Jim Breyer, Don Graham and Peter Thiel, David Sze (observer) and Paul Mader (observer). Facebook’s headquarters are in Palo Alto, California and they have offices in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas,  Detroit,  New York,  Venice Beach, Dublin, London, Paris, Sydney and Toronto.

Do You Want To Reach 350.000.000 Targeted Customers?

I have finally finished and published my Facebook Advertising Guide. It is currently available as a digital download managed by PayDotCom (108 pages, full colour) and it will be later available as a paperback.

Facebook Advertising Guide is not about fancy theories and statistics how to make million dollars on Facebook overnight. This guide book is a practical Facebook guide for all of you who want to learn how Facebook advertising works and how to do it effectively. Within the different chapters of this book I will present visual step-by-step guides how to do certain marketing operations on Facebook. There are also plenty of references and web addresses (URL’s) to various areas on Facebook and the web. Facebook Advertising Guide will show you how to bring your message across to over 350 Million targeted Facebook users quick and easy. I will teach you how you can advertise  effectively on Facebook plus how  you can create and advertise Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups, Facebook News Feeds and much more. There are also plenty of real life examples of Facebook advertising projects from real companies.

If you would like to get a copy of the new Facebook Advertising Guide, please click here.

Facebook announced yesterday that they are the world’s largest social network on the planet. Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement claiming that Facebook has now more than 300 million users worldwide. It seems like only yesterday they had a mere 150 million users and that has now doubled in 13 months! Mr. Zuckerberg proudly underlined his social network’s steady growth and also announced that the company itself has now become self-sustaining and cash-flow positive. The top spot remains still undecided since China’s largest social network, QZone has also claimed 300 million users. As most of QZone users would be Chinese that would mean roughly every fourth person in China would be there. Personally I find that hard to believe. The third spot is certain though; it belongs to MySpace with 245 million users. If you enjoyed this post, then make sure you subscribe to my RSS Feed or ReTweet.

Earlier this month, Starbucks surpassed Coca Cola becoming the most popular brand on Facebook, with close to 3.8 million fans. Coca Cola has a tad over 3.6 million fans at the moment. (Hilary Duff here isn’t doing bad either with over 570.000 fans on her official Facebook page.)

This is a direct result of Starbucks’ aggressive internet and social media strategy according to Starbucks digital strategy director, Alexandra Wheeler. Starbucks is now actively incorporating and utilising the most popular social media channels, such as Twitter and Facebook in its online marketing.

Starbuck’s Free Pastry campaign, where you received a free pastry with a beverage purchase was a huge success. Nearly 600,000 people reacted to that campaign on Facebook. Another hugely successful campaign was their Product (Red) campaign with almost a million people responding “yes” or “maybe” to the promotion last holiday season. Product (Red) contributed 5 cents for every Starbucks beverage purchased to the AIDS-fighting project. These results show the power of the Starbucks as a brand and how well it has been able to connect with their clients through these social media networks.

According to Wheeler one of the key priorities we have to think about when it comes to social media marketing is that we have to connect in ways that are relevant to those environments as well as to our consumers. One of the most powerful ways is by sharing content and participating in discussion.

Starbucks has also a big fan base on Twitter. They have over 270.000 followers and are following 85.000 of them back. Almost all of Starbucks’ posts are @ replies which means that they actually are communicating with their fans. Most of the communication on their Facebook page, however is done by the fans on the wall posts. If you enjoyed this post, then make sure you subscribe to my RSS Feed or ReTweet.

Businesses are gradually realising the commercial potential of 250 million Facebook users and opening shops inside Facebook. The latest shop to open doors is 1-800-flowers.com founded by Jim McCann who started his first retail store in 1976 in New York. Now the online flower retailer has launched an e-commerce store which they claim to be the first fully functional commercial store front inside Facebook.

Registered Facebook users can now order all kinds of flower products from the online florist and gift shop without ever leaving the social network environment. The shopping itself is quite easy and straight forward. First you choose a nice bunch of flowers from their catalogue; the prices vary from $29.99 to over $100. Then you enter your US based zip code and delivery date; next your contact details and the recipient’s details and finally your credit card numbers and you’re done. So, for instance as the lovely Sandra Bullock here had her birthday 4 days ago you could have sent her some red roses straight through your Facebook account. Very handy indeed! Sandra has about 30.000 fans on Facebook by the way!

The 1-800-flowers.com Facebook Shop has been built by a relatively new network developer, Alvenda who are based in Minneapolis. Alvenda was founded just last year by Wade Gerten, Brian Howe and Lou Abramowski. So far the Facebook Flower Shop has attracted 1,905 fans, me included, but I’m sure it will gain lots more as the news start spreading. Currently 1-800-flowers accepts payment with all major credit cards, but as (if) Facebook introduces its own internal currency (see Facebook Money Is Coming) you would be able to make purchases using that as well. If you enjoyed this post, then make sure you subscribe to my RSS Feed or ReTweet.

As advertisers are increasingly interested in Facebook advertising, ad revenues are not the only source of revenue for Facebook. Facebook started testing virtual currency just a few months ago so the company could also be profiting from the sale of virtual goods. With these “virtual money credits” Facebook users could carry out transactions in certain sub networks. Websites view alternative payment methods as a way to accelerate the sales of the virtual goods that can be an important source of revenue. On Facebook there is the potential for a currency exchange market similar to the hugely popular virtual world, Second Life. Second Life users have been using their Linden Dollars for quite some time now and they seem to be working fine in that particular environment. Linden Dollar rates fluctuate based on supply and demand, but over the last few years they have remained fairly stable. For 1 Us Dollar (US$) you can get about 260 Linden Dollars (L$). While Second Life’s currency is used to purchase virtual items (obviously), Facebook’s currency could be used to purchase real-world items as well; here is a huge potential for the recently updated Facebook Marketplace as well as Facebook Auctions and similar services.

Second Life has almost 15 million registered users from over 100 countries and a fully functioning economy with more than $300 million Linden Dollars transacted annually. As they have successfully implemented the use of virtual money in their environment, you might even speculate with the possibility of using Linden Dollars successfully on Facebook. This would create the biggest online marketplace in the world that would have it’s own currency. Science fiction? I don’t think so.

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!

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)