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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If you enjoy using Social Media Websites chances are that you would have a Facebook account as well as a Twitter account. Both of these allow you to make updates to your status. By creating a connection between these two accounts you only need to write your message once as it will be posted to the other one automatically. There are two ways of creating the connection between Facebook and Twitter. You can link your Twitter account to your personal Facebook account; or you can link your Facebook Page to your Twitter account.  In the first option the message goes from Twitter to Facebook and in the second option it goes from Facebook to Twitter. For instance if you use Twitter regularly just write your message on your Twitter account and it will be posted automatically on your Facebook account. You will see it on your Facebook profile page and it will appear on the Facebook News Feed. Here is how you can do that in just a few simple steps.

Connecting Your Twitter Account to Your Personal Facebook Account

In this connection when you write a message on your Twitter account it gets automatically posted into your Facebook status and Wall. Here are 5 simple steps how you can make that connection. You need to be logged into your Facebook account in order to do this.

Step 1 – Locate the Twitter Application

The Twitter application as well as many other cool applications are stored in the Facebook Applications area.

http://www.facebook.com/apps/directory.php

Alternatively, you can access it directly at the following URL:

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2231777543

Once you have located the application click the blue ‘Go to Application’ -button.

Step2 – Allow Access

By clicking the ‘Allow’ –button you will authorise Twitter and Facebook create the connection needed. Go ahead and … click.

Step 3 – Log on to Twitter

Next you will need to log in to your Twitter account to make the connection happen.

Since we are creating a connection to your personal Facebook account you should use your personal Twitter account here as well.

Step 4 – Allow Twitter updates

In order to get the automatic update from your Twitter account to show up on your Facebook status you need to click the ‘+ Allow Twitter to Update Your Facebook Status’ –button.

This enables the connection and sends you to the next screen.

Step 5 – Authorisation

This is a bit unnecessary step but you need to click the blue ‘Allow Status Updates’ –button to finalise the operation.

The only good thing about this page is that it gives you the page URL where you can change the settings of this Twitter application as well as your other Facebook applications. Here is the direct link to that page: http://www.facebook.com/editapps.php

Once you click the button you will be back on the previous screen. From this screen you can also update your Facebook status. This will be posted automatically to you Twitter account as well. Please note that when you update your status on your Facebook profile page as you would do normally, it does not post to your Twitter account.

…and you’re done!

Congratulations!

You have now connected your Twitter account with your personal Facebook account. Everytime you  write a new Twitter post it will now automatically show up on your Facebook Profile. Next time we will have a look how to connect your Facebook Business Page to your Twitter business account.

This article is Part 2 of the illustrated bonus guide ‘Linking Facebook and Twitter‘ which you can get free by ordering the Facebook Advertising Guide.

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If you are a Twitter user then you would know about the popular re-tweet function. When you receive a Twitter post , or a Tweet that you like you can do a re-tweet on it by clicking on the Retweet button in that post. The message will get posted to your account with a mention about the original person who wrote it (RT @johnsmith). This is a great way of spreading interesting or important posts on Twitter and often these messages spread virally. Ever since Facebook tried to buy Twitter (see post) they have been trying to emulate Twitter’s operations; and it’s no surprise when Facebook decided to have  its own version of Twitter’s re-tweet functionality. It doesn’t have a cool name yet like ‘re-tweet’ or anything so people are just calling it the ‘Facebook Via Feature’. This new feature lets you make a re-post on another user’s shared items such as links.

This is how you do re-tweet (or Facebook via) on Facebook:

When you see a friend’s posted item in your news feed that you would like to re-post click the ‘share‘ button below it. A new window opens up and and you will see a mention ‘via johnsmith (Remove)‘  below the comment box. Write your comment in the box and click the Share-button. If you don’t want to use the via-feature then click the Remove-button before you post it on your profile. Once you have shared your friend’s post it will appear on your profile with a via link that points to your friend’s profile. Your friends will also see the item in their News Feed and they can in turn do a re-post creating a viral loop of the message. Pretty cool, eh? Go ahead now and give it a go… and let me know how you find this feature.

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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 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

Twitter rejected a $500 million acquisition offer from Facebook.

Facebook started the talks about buying Twitter in mid October this year. Twitter was offered $100 M cash and $400M worth of Facebook stock. The talks ended as Twitter rejected the offer as their investors decided that $500 million for over 63 million registered users was not enough. They were also concerned wether the Twitter <> Facebook integration could be done properly. Twitter executives also believe that Twitter is able to earn its own revenue as it’s user base is rapidly growing. It remains to be seen how they will actually start earning revenue, as currently they are not making any money. Pretty bold to say no to $500 million!

Now that Facebook has expressed it’s interest in Twitter it is almost certain that Twitter will get more offers in the future – after all, Twitter is a huge hit in terms of the number of users and the online popularity it already enjoys.

Twitter was launched in mid 2006 as a social networking and micro-blogging site that allows users to post updates. A Twitter post is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through their own web form,  a text message or an instant message. The company adds constantly new features to their product, such as browser plug-ins, iPod and Facebook integration and Gmail import and search. In April 2008 Twitter launched their Japanese version, which includes advertisements as well.