What is Facebook and how does it work?
Well the best definition we found was on Wikipedia so “Facebook is a social networking website. Users can add friends and send them messages, update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organised by city, workplace, school and region. A study in January 2009 found that Facebook is the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users (followed by MySpace).
Recent stats have shown that the average user spends around 20 minutes per day on their Facebook Page and there are over 10 million registered users in the UK alone, with a huge number joining up each day.
Facebook is free to join and is very simple to set up and it’s ability to allow you to share your life with friends and family around the globe, quickly and simply has lead to it’s dominance and popularity.
The first thing you do is create an account, putting in your name and profile, the data that Facebook collects is one of the reasons why it is so popular with advertisers, in that it allows every single piece of information collected to be displayed to advertisers (not on an individual basis) it is one of the most informative demographic profiling tools available to advertisers. There are some privacy measures that ensure that your information is only shared with those that you have invited, however you have to make sure that you select this option.
Once a user has created a page they can look for friends and family and invite them to become Facebook friends. They have made this simpler by allowing you to import your email address into the Facebook application – and you then have an option to simply ‘invite friends’.
Facebook has overtaken Friends Reunited by a long way in being the preferred tool for finding old friends, colleagues and relatives – it’s search facility allows you to search for people by a number of different methods – such as search by high school.
One of the reasons that Facebook has become so popular is that it allows you to access a wider ‘social network’ ie your friends on facebook will have other friends that you can then ‘see’. Facebook takes the view that we all collect like-minded friends and eventually you will have a network of ‘common friends’.
Facebook also has some intuitive algorithms which will suggest people who you may know allowing you to get back in touch with someone who you haven’t heard from or lost touch with. When you go into your Friends option it provides you with a list of other friends you might have in common, which leads to even wider networks and more usage.
One of the main reasons that Facebook has become so popular is that it allows individuals to keep in touch with all their friends, quickly, simply and easily, which in a busy world is a great advantage. There is an option for you to tell everyone ‘what you are doing right now’ – which is incredibly popular. There are options to allow friends to recommend applications or video content that they have seen on the site, games they have played or send ‘virtual postcards’.
Facebook has literally thousands of ‘applications’ and even has it’s own language such as ‘poking’ (when one person gets in touch with another via Facebook – as in ‘I’ll poke you’)
Facebooks photosharing functionality is the most used photosharing platform in the world, allowing users to upload and tag photos of themselves, friends, family and events.
OK so hopefully you know now what Facebook is and maybe even tempted to go online and create your own profile.
But what’s the big deal for businesses, well if you start by thinking about your target audience, and if they fall into the Facebook demographic (which is almost everyone in the UK with internet access) and think that the average time spent each day is 20 minutes – that is an awful lot of eyeball time.
And Facebook has all sorts of options for businesses to take advantage of you can:-
Create your own facebook page
Create your own facebook group
Advertise for free on the ‘Wall’
Promote events, products, offers and competitions to a vast audience
Advertise using the powerful social advertising capabilities
If you’d like to know more about how you can benefit from Facebook and how Prodo Digital can generate new engagement for new customers on your behalf then simply contact our Facebook Advertising experts now
on 0844 871 7272