It's no secret that the worlds largest and probably most loved social media platform would be worth a fair few pennies. With 100 million people signed up, that's one important email list and audience and that means marketing power. More to the point, if they were to stay afloat on the stock market in 2012, they will be one of the richest companies in the world, and most importantly, the youngest company to achieve that honour.
It usually takes a business a generation or so to build up a large enough consumer base and a platform where they can earn that much money. But Facebook has done it in just 7 years. Estimated to be worth around £3bn currently, can Facebook really sell all its marketing resources and make £100 billion? This article looks at how Facebook has achieved so much in so little time.
Addiction Helps Marketing
Unlike any other websites, Facebook is a place where you spend more than 5 minutes browsing. On average, when a user signs into Facebook, they are signed in and active for about 30 minutes. This means they can see and register more and more adverts and marketing pages. The more traffic Facebook can send to these brands, the more money they get in advertising space. For what ever reasons, people love Facebook and they send a lot of time on it meaning they see adverts by default.
Personal Touches
Facebook has worked hard to make sure that each user feels like they have a platform to themselves. A place where they can share information, most importantly, share information about themselves. With Facebook harvesting personal data, such as birthdays, interests, likes and locations, they know which adverts to target at who and how to best engage and unite money-making with useabilty. And with the new Facebook Timeline being rolled out, Facebook will be King of the personal data marketing strategy as they will know so much more than the likes of Twitter or Google for example. This means they can really invest their time and money into getting the correct adverts to the correct people and thus making even more money in diverted traffic. After all, it would be poor performance if Facebook had all this personal data but didn't use it to their own advantage.
And why not? People add their data to a social network, so expect them to use it. As David Kirkpatrick, Facebook chronicler, once said, Facebook is:
probably the most valuable market research tool that's ever existed" ~ Courtesy of BBC News Online
Selective Advertising
Facebook prides itself on these types of adverts. Although you do get commercial, physical products you can actively buy, you also get TV ads and music. Things that you can "do"rather than "get". This makes Facebook users feel more comfortable as they are being suggested things to watch, listen to, try rather than just seeing blatant in-your-face marketing such as, "Buy this, it's amazing!" When there's less intrusion in advertising and it's aimed at you rather than everyone, people sit up, listen and become proactive.
Key Take-Away
Facebook has become the ultimate personal marketing tool, whether they ever meant to or not. And with them having a free network, they completely rely on their marketing masterminds to generate them enough money to continue and in my opinion, they do it well. But that's not to say they should market and advertise freely, remain on the path now where it's thoughtful and it will continue to do well.
~Articles metioned in this post: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15962476
~Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/socialmediaonlineclassescom
Who Wrote This Article?
I'm Nikki and I work at MarketMeSuite, the social media marketing dashboard. We have some Great news! We are now free! Please check it out and be sure to let me know what you think!
