Facebook Advertising | Social Media Marketing

Did anybody see this coming? Social network becoming bigger than a search engine? Facebook said it can be done; and they’ve done it last week! Facebook surpassed Google in the United States to become the most visited site on the Internet for the week 8th-14th March 2010. As this feat is an amazing result for the company you might not know that Facebook has been reaching the No. 1 position on several short occations in the past as well; on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year’s Day as well as the first weekend this March.

According to a US based metrics company Experian Hitwise Facebook claimed its top position over Google with 7.07 % of total Internet visits in US whereas Google had to settle for position two behind the world’s biggest social network with 7.03 %. Facebook’s growth has been phenomenal in the past year. Facebook visits grew by a whopping 185 % while Google was able to increase its visit only by 9 %. Together these two Internet behemoths accounted for almost 15 % of all US based Internet traffic last week.

Google is in a bit of a trouble with all the competition from the popular social networking sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook. Their new Buzz service is designed to compete with Twitter and is very cleverly integrated with Gmail. So far it hasn’t reached a big following as some security issues have been raised. Also the interface isn’t as clever as in Twitter or Facebook Wall.

Facebook continues to grow at a very nice pace and is now attracting more than 400 million global users. This is good news for the advertisers as they now have a huge social platform which can reach a lot of potential clients. Facebook’s advertising engine is famous for being the best in the market for accurately defining and reaching your target audience.

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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.

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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Facebook’s international growth has been strong over the last year, with a whopping 117% growth in monthly visitors and 75% growth in page views. US growth has been impressive as well, up 33% from 31 million to 42 million.

Both Bebo and MySpace are losing popularity in UK as Facebook continues to grow its audience.