September 15, 2010
"We ain't one-at-a-timin' here. We're MASS communicating!'"
- Pappy O'Daniel
If you think Facebook is for lonely housewives and Greenpeace
hipsters, you need to think again. Facebook has quickly earned
a following of over 500,000,000 addicted users who login each
morning before so much as answering the call of nature. But
the habit forming nature of Facebook isn't why it's critical
to the expansion of every online business.
EVERYONE KNOWS WHEN YOU "LIKE" SOMEONE
Until recently, regardless of how cool your latest search engine
find was, how many people would you share that super-cool website
with? Answer: zero. Come on, you might make it a bookmark or
favorite but you probably didn't tell anyone else about it for
weeks, if ever. THIS IS WHERE FACEBOOK CHANGES THE GAME.
Consider the following:
- When you LIKE a Facebook business page, the system automatically
notifies all your friends and includes a link to that page
- The average Facebook user has 130 friends
Forget "you tell 2 friends and they tell 2 friends and
so on and so on..." Now it's "you tell 50 friends
and they tell 500 friends and they tell 5000 friends...."
We'd all have drastically more successful businesses if Google,
Yahoo, Bing, et al. had been notifying everyone in your Outlook
Address Book every time you added a site to your Favorites List.
But why does Facebook do this?
BIRDS OF A FEATHER "LIKE" TOGETHER
Think about it - If you're into metal detecting or candle making
or flyfishing, chances are that at least some of your friends
and family are too... and maybe their friends as well. Facebook,
like all online publishers, want you to view as many pages /
visit as possible. Their notification system tries to maximize
pageviews (Facebook daily pageviews surpassed Google in March
2010) and thereby ad revenue. The more pages you view, the better
the chance that you'll click on one of the many right-margin
paid ads.
The benefit to your business is that you don't need to get
1000 Google searches to get 1000 people to know that it exists.
Now we can benefit from the viral nature of social netowrking
and grow our businesses like never before.
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