Facebook Marketing: Starting an Online Business

The newest trend in the internet today is joining one of the many social networking websites. Here, you will be able to keep in touch with your old friends as well as your relatives and you will also be able to make new friends as well as meet new people. With social networking websites, you will see that it will make the world a smaller place.

One social networking website that is so popular among many people from all over the world is Facebook. In this website, you will be able to post your pictures, discuss your interests and hobbies as well as do other great things.

In the past, Facebook was restricted to Harvard College students. In time, it expanded to other schools and universities until it became available for everyone above the age of 13 from different parts of the world.

Presently, the Facebook website now has more than 62 million active users worldwide.

Now, if you have an online business, you will see that Facebook can significantly help you promote your website and your business. Facebook marketing is now one of the hottest trends among online entrepreneurs today. Just think about it, with over 62 million active users worldwide, you will definitely have a lot of potential clients to do business with.

Because of the amount of people joining Facebook, a lot of online business owners are now joining this social networking website in order to market their products or services. With Facebook, you will definitely be able to effectively market your website.

The great thing about Facebook today is that anyone will now be able to join it. Whether you are a college student or you are an entrepreneur looking for a niche market, Facebook is the place that you should go to.

In fact, Facebook is now very popular that it is now investing a lot of money for advertising in order to attract more people to join. With this kind of benefit, you will see the potential on what your business can have.

Facebook as well as other social networking websites are now just beginning to see its full potential.

Today, you will see that Facebook has now launched its Facebook Ads system that will allow you and other fellow business owners to formally advertise your products and services. You have to consider the fact that people are three to five times more likely buy a particular product if their friends recommend it. If you advertise in Facebook, you will be able to increase your sales.

Facebook is now very popular that it now contains ads for big corporations, such as Microsoft, Coca-Cola and other companies.

So, if you are thinking about marketing online for your business and you want to increase your company's sales, then you may want to try out Facebook. Here, you will be able to increase the advertising potential for your company. Also, you will be able to reach out to more people as well as get a niche market for your products and services.

So, if you think that online advertising or marketing is not working for you, you might want to try out marketing on Facebook. Here, you will be able to see how effective marketing is by using this one of a kind social networking website and you will be able to increase your sales. 

Eight Billion Reasons Yahoo Didn't Buy Facebook

For much of the year, Facebook had been in negotiation to sell itself to Yahoo. The market value of the "instant behemoth" social service sites has fluctuated, as services both large and small have changed hands this year. The first big acquisition was Newscorp's purchase of MySpace for $580 million in 2005. That set a benchmark, which was driven upward somewhat by the NBC Universal purchase of women's online network iVillage for $600 million earlier this year.

Social networking sites typically allow users to create and share blogs, pictures and videos with friends and the wider public. What makes Facebook different from MySpace? Its founder(s) set out to create a social networking site that is designed for post-high school users. It connects people by region, college, company and high school.

Build a personal profile and connect with others that are sharing your life experience as opposed to your social, entertainment and artistic interests, which are the focal points in MySpace. Facebook attempted to blend a little maturity into the energized chaos found on MySpace, and they have been successful. Their current membership is somewhere north of ten million - compared to the 145 million that MySpace claims.

The MySpace inclusion of 'artist pages' allows artists working in audio and video mediums to freely distribute media from within a social network. It has become a central feature of the network. Artist pages exist alongside individual profiles, and in addition to the regular profile features they allow the artists to upload media and distribute it in the network. Individuals can link to artist pages, endorse media, and participate as fans. This feature resulted in bands using the site to promote their music, one of the dynamics of the site that has made it so successful.

Facebook's orientation around actual communities makes it much more efficient as a connectivity tool. You can connect to anyone within your group and you can search for people across the entire Facebook spectrum. Specific interest areas are much more easily brought into focus and it is easier to build a group around them. The big question for Facebook is its relevance past the college years. The question for MySpace will be its ability to undergo a little maturation in the form of advertising and control of commercial video and music posting.

In the marketplace Facebook has had several suitors on its dance card, having held negotiations with both Microsoft and Viacom over the past year. Microsoft has in fact signed a deal with Facebook whereby Microsoft will sell and provide banner ads and sponsored links for Facebook using its adCenter online advertising software. Some medial analysts dismiss this deal as minor, citing banner adds as passé and sponsored posts as an advertising method that is showing some age as well.

In the Google corner, the company has announced a deal with MySpace to pay at least $900 million in shared advertising revenue and become the site's sole search provider. As part of the deal, Fox Interactive Media will add Google search boxes to MySpace and its other web sites. Google has first crack at selling any display ads Fox doesn't sell directly. Google has shown an ability to work partnership agreements and a willingness to settle for a piece of the action that has served them well in the feinting and blocking that occurs in the Internet consolidation ring.

Google's purchase of YouTube ratcheted up the pressure on Yahoo to close the deal. It's worth noting that Google bought YouTube with Google stock - a choice that was not open to Yahoo in their Facebook negotiations. Earlier this summer Yahoo decided that Facebook was too expensive at $1 billion and in July, came close to closing an agreement at the $800 million figure. The reported high offer of just over 1.6 billion was rejected, and now Facebook claims it isn't for sale, but if it was, it's worth at least 8 billion.

From a financial/cultural perspective, Yahoo had a lot on the line with this acquisition because it would have significantly reshaped the portal's efforts to establish and hold a Yahoo "community." In one Yahoo corner or another, many of the features contained in both MySpace and FaceBook can be found already as Yahoo proprietary components. What is missing is the packaging and the social cachet that both social networking services hold for young people.

Yahoo has built a strategy of drawing Internet users and advertising through building community-based services on the Web, but acquisitions so far have been on a small scale. Recently Yahoo has acquired Bix, MyBlogLog and Kenet Works. Bix and MyBlogLog are built along social networking lines, and will work (hopefully) as a complement to Yahoo's current properties: Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming and WebJay. All of these have slightly different orientations: FLickr is photo-centric, Delicious is a blog tagging and sharing service and Bix is a digital karaoke and entertainment site that takes amateur uploads.

While the Yahoo / Facebook deal appears to be dead, the evolution of social networking sites is bringing several characteristics to light. There is some indication that user loyalty is a slippery issue. MySpace users are migrating to Facebook, YouTube and other sites as their primary "hookup." Average visitation time on the site has dropped by over half.

On the other hand, Media metrics firm Hitwise has released its Media Report which found that MySpace is still atop the social networking mountain, with 82 percent of visits to the top 20 social networking sites landing on their site. Whatever the figure, Yahoo's attempted purchase of Facebook would have been an expensive bet on a hot product that could cool as quickly as Friendster and others that have preceded it. Finding an advertising model that works for the Facebook is also going to be a challenge, particularly given the existing Microsoft deal to handle some ad placement for the service. Given the turbulence in the social network marketplace, the inability to close the deal may end up being a positive for Yahoo.

Avatarbook - Facebook Meets Online Gaming.

For those of you who don’t know, the Sims Online is undergoing a revolution. Having been left standing for the last few years with little to no input, EA are at last re-shaping the game, and the world of multiplayer gaming as we know it. Sound like hyperbole? Perhaps, perhaps not; check out their latest addition to the online gaming experience: AvatarBook.

Facebook made flesh

So what is Avatarbook? Well, the clue is in the name. What is one of the largest social networking websites on the planet at the moment? That’s right -– Facebook. With over 58 million users, Facebook is the primary reason that many of us log on in the morning. But, as we all know, it has its limitations. As do online games.

One problem with online games is that they can be too divorced from reality -– you have your online friends, and your real-world friends, and the two remain firmly divided. Ditto Facebook -– your user-circle is limited by who you already know, and it’s hard to get to know people outside of that circle on a one-to-one basis without sharing all your private data or being introduced by a friend of a friend.

All that is set to change, with a new application that could change our networking community forever. When Linden Labs made Linden Dollars (the currency of the hugely popular game Second Life) exchangeable for real-world currency, they opened up the world of online gaming by bringing it into the real world. Now EA want to do the same thing, by allowing users of the Sims Online to link their Avatars' accounts to their Facebook profiles.

Sharing Information

Avatarbook has two faces -- the in-game version and the Facebook version. In-game you can use it much like Facebook, in that you can find other Avatars and view their limited profiles. For friends the full profiles are visible, with walls for people to write on and updatable status. Your profile will also show if your lot is open or not, and the application an be used to quickly make your way around EA Land as you jump from friend to friend.

In Facebook, the application shows your Avatar's details (unless you have chosen a private setting) and picture, and whether or not you are logged on to the game. This is a useful way for players to find out who is online without having to log in themselves. You can also invite other users of Facebook who are not already Sims Online players to download the application and see your Avatar profile -- a move that EA hopes will attract more people to the game.

For the time being, then, the bulk of information that can be shared is Avatar-related. Their skills, properties and friends can all be viewed, and their Wall. The identity of the real-life person behind the Avatar is kept private, at least for now.

Privacy

Privacy is a major issue as far as EA are concerned, so at the moment Avatarbook is fairly limited in how much information can be shared. In the Sims game you can add people to your friends list, which will provide them with a link to your Facebook profile rather than making a direct link, though that is set to change as the application grows. Also, nobody in EA Land (the Sims Online world where the application will be available) will have access to your real name - you will be searchable only by your Avatar's name. EA have stated that they intend to allow players to lower their privacy settings so that more information can be shared, but at the moment they're playing it safe.

The Future

This application obviously shows great potential, and it is something that EA are going to continue to develop as they gain feedback from users. The Sims Online game is going through a revolution at the moment, with their free trial set to become permanent free play in the very near future (with limited gameplay for non-payers, much like in Second Life). For years now Second Life has been leading the pack in terms of innovation and social interactivity, but if EA keeps this up then we could be looking at a new contender for the crown. After all, they did come up with the two most popular games of all time (Sims and Sims 2), so some would say that this is less of a surprise than a belated homecoming. Certainly one to watch, at any rate.

8 Steps To Facebook Adventure

Once a social platform for college students, the 40 million active membership site facebook is the latest buzzword in social media marketing. However, most members are extremely online savvy and they smell blatant advertisements from miles away. It is important to know some basics and gain experiences in utilizing the site and interacting with its members before you start planning your facebook marketing adventure.

1. Create a profile. The first step is to create a profile. Sign up using your real name and upload some pictures. If you do not have an email with a top-level edu domain, by default you join a regional network based on your zip code or international address. Later, you have the option to join your company's network and change your regional networks. You can change your networks twice in a 60-day period.

Always upload a profile picture. If you don't upload a picture, facebook places a default question mark icon. It is a good strategy to show your face in facebook. Don't use group pictures for your profile because others may have difficulty identifying you in the group pictures. Don't use logos, your cute cat or dogs’ pictures, or a picture of your expensive car and boat.

You don't have to fill all the profile information. Fill only the information you are comfortable sharing with others. If you want to find dates using facebook, fill up the relationship status feature of your profile accordingly. Don't change the status often because others will notice it and doubt your trustworthiness.

2. Make friends. The site can find active facebook friends for you using emails in your address books of a few free web email providers like yahoo, hotmail, gmail, etc. Once you get a few friends, new friend requests will pour in from your friends of friends. You can also search for friends and send requests. Work on creating a network of 100 to 200 friends. Don't make friends with celebrities because in most cases these are fake profiles setup for marketing purposes.

3. Upload pictures and videos. Start uploading some interesting pictures and group them in albums of travel pictures, baby shower photos, bachelor party scenes, etc. Pictures help people connect with your life without meeting you face to face. Always upload a number of related pictures or themes.

Create a random albums and put all your random pictures in the random album. Tag your pictures to identify people on the pictures. When you tag your friends in your pictures, they show up in their wall. You can also share your albums with others outside facebook. You can upload personal videos using your browser or mobile phone and directly record videos to facebook.

4. Use friends' walls and never post on your own wall. You have a wall in facebook for others to write notes. Don't write in your own wall. Write in your friends' walls. Your friends will write notes, share videos or links in your wall. You do the same in your friends' walls. When a friend posts something on your wall, reply to the post. If you find the posting annoying, politely ask them to back off and clean up your wall.

5. Join a few groups. There are all sorts of organic groups in facebook. These are groups of people with similar interests. Find a few that interest you and join them. You can create your own group but first find out if one exists on the same topic. This is an excellent place to be creative and get support from a bunch of people for your cause.

6. Create events and invite people. If you want to host a party, this is the feature you will use. Create your events and invite others to join. You can make an event public for your friends to see or private for the invitees to browse. Under my event, you can browse your friends' public events. You will immediately know who are your fake friends because they did not invite you to their gala dinner they are hosting.

7. Send notes and share links. You send notes to your friends. Depending on the topic, you can send a note to a few friends or to all friends in your network. Don't send chain letter notes because people find these repulsive. Your notes show up in your friends' news feeds or on their walls. A tagged note shows up on the wall, otherwise, it is found in the homepage news feed. Use share for sharing links, even though you can use this feature for sharing notes. Share that link of a cheap travel-booking site you have found while surfing the net with friends planning their upcoming vacations.

8. Visit your homepage everyday. Besides your profile page in facebook, you also have a homepage. You homepage displays collaborative news feeds of all your friends, event and group invitations, friendship requests, friends' birthdays, etc. If you want to know what is going on in your facebook friend circle, visit your homepage everyday.

The other features of facebook are poke, marketplace, facebook mobile, and hundreds of applications that enhance the facebook experience. As the facebook awareness grows, online marketers have started pounding the facebook door to gain a foothold. Future articles will discuss different ways to market your products and services to facebook members without insulting their intelligence.

Facebook: $750 Mil in Hand Worth More than $2Bil in Sky

Facebook.com is essentially an online medium of communication for college students and high schoolers. For its valued reach Zuckerberg and his crew of Harvard dropouts (taking their cue from Bill Gates, no doubt) must be looking for Google-sized compensation, but the two billion dollar figure is arbitrary and difficult to justify.

It came up conversationally, but I believe I’m the only person at my company to have firsthand experience as a user of Facebook.com. It was kind of funny to have all these online advertising professionals asking me all about the website everybody used in college. Didn’t they get the memo? I’m new. I should be asking the questions around here. The subject of Facebook.com is an interesting one that’s worth a closer look.

Without question 2005 was the year of MySpace. Before Rupert Murdoch’s $580 million social networking venture took the interactive world by storm, it’s difficult to believe that even the most optimistic of the billionaire’s lackeys would have predicted that new acquisition would more than quadruple its reach within a matter of months. With 23.5 billion page views by February, MySpace became the second most trafficked site on the Internet.

Murdoch’s success naturally generated buying interest in anything deemed online social networking. One proposed deal in March 2006, was Viacom’s unsuccessful $750 million bid for Facebook.com, the phenomenon started by wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg. After Facebook.com declined the offer, its founders pegged Facebook.com’s worth at two billion dollars. Perhaps the brilliant sparks from MySpace’s success has blinded Facebook.com to the flipside reality of Friendster’s paradise lost. There’s a real chance Facebook won’t see an offer this generous again.

Facebook.com is essentially an online medium of communication for college students and high schoolers. For its valued reach Zuckerberg and his crew of Harvard dropouts (taking their cue from Bill Gates, no doubt) must be looking for Google-sized compensation, but the two billion dollar figure is arbitrary and difficult to justify. Perhaps Facebook is emboldened by their own wise decision in not selling to Yahoo for $15 million in 2004.

Zuckerberg was likely trying to establish a market value for his creation, not an unwise move on the face of things. However, Viacom’s offer was not by any stretch of the imagination pocket change and the number of entities that can and will double the bid Facebook already got is finite.

Facebook’s traffic numbers, as referenced on Alexa.com, during the last three months are not encouraging; that is, if the goal is to fish for more and greater buyout bids. The numbers actually have trended downward since March, anathema for enticing hyper bidding growth. These diminishing statistics can be at least partially attributed to the cyclical nature of the school year since Facebook, after all, is geared towards the college student. It doesn’t matter how great the product is, it won’t keep students from doing their own thing during summer vacation and this yearly dip is potentially damaging.

Seeing as how fast online fads can expand and contract in social networking as we’ve seen in its short time span, what if the numbers don’t come back? What if something new pops up in two months that steals Facebook’s thunder? (And, again, MySpace’s success serves as good reason why this thunder is worth stealing.)

Facebook.com’s success has also been marred with some controversy that could taint its popularity with students. At Syracuse University a flap over freedom of expression ensued when a Facebook.com group went overboard in critiquing a student teacher and ended up with expulsions from the class and social suspension before three students transferred. After Penn State’s football team beat Ohio State this year students rushed the field and made a ruckus. Overwhelmed police made only two arrests that day, but later in the week they logged onto Facebook.com and, like Canadian Mounties who always get their man, got plenty of names and faces and photos from the info posted by students about their on-field shenanigans. Kids talk and these stories spread like wildfire, which may affect Facebook.com negatively – they can’t control misuse of their product and the negative repercussions that come from it.

The future is promising for the social networking business space and I don’t believe Facebook.com is doomed. Still, given the nature of short-lived and over-hyped dotcoms, Facebook may have reached their growth climax this school year, with possibility for expansion and success only contingent on acquisition. Time may not be on their side because as the pages of the calendar turn there will doubtlessly be new fads and trends that will threaten to make something else the “Next Big Thing” at Facebook.com’s expense. The clock is ticking.

Social Advertising Through Facebook

Introduction

Is Facebook going to be a good source of traffic for you, or is it still just full of a bunch of young kids… Last month, Microsoft announced that it had purchased a $240 million stake in Facebook, valuing the young company at $15 billion, with the intention of expanding its existing advertising partnership.

(http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-9811932-36.html)

Facebook Ads is an ad system for businesses to connect with users and target advertising to the exact audiences they want. Through Facebook Ads, the users can now learn about new businesses, brands and products through the trusted referrals of their friends.

Advertising on Facebook

• It’s a way for businesses to build pages on Facebook to connect with their audiences
• An ad system that facilitates the spread of brand messages virally through Facebook Social Ads™;

· Facebook offers Social Ads targeted by age, sex, location, keywords, education level, workplaces, political views, and relationship status. Pay by CPM or CPC.

· You will be able to change your Daily Budget after your ads are running. The Daily Budget represents the maximum that you wish to spend each day. The minimum Daily Budget is $5. You will never be charged more than the total of the Daily Budgets that you have set for your active campaigns. These campaigns are similar to Google Adwords.

• And an interface to gather insights into people’s activity on Facebook that marketers care about.

· Beacon allows partners to send Facebook information about what users do on their websites, in order to publish the info inside Facebook via the Mini Feed and News Feed.

· You can pay to poll Facebook users, too.

The various options available in Facebook advertising

• Facebook Platform
• Facebook Pages
• Facebook Beacon
• Facebook Insight
• Facebook Polls

A comparison of Facebook with Google Adwords
 

• Facebook is very simple
• Facebook allows a picture with no extra cost.
• Your ad is the ONLY shown on the side. Not competing with 10 other ads.
• 135 characters is the advertisement body, unlike 35 of Adwords.
• With Facebook you can either target the general public of an entire country. Or laser target down to how old they are, where they live, where they work, and their interest/hobbies. It could be argued that with Facebook you can get even more laser traffic than Adwords.

Facebook Pages

Page is a unique experience where users can become more deeply connected with your business. . Users can express their support by adding themselves as a fan, writing on your Wall, uploading photos, and joining other fans in discussion groups. You can send updates to your fans regularly or just with special news or offers.

You can increase the viral distribution of your Facebook Page with Facebook Social Ads.

Social Ads increase the number of friends who will see the story when they visit Facebook, and you can also target the ads to specific demographics

Facebook Beacon

Beacon is a part of Facebook's advertisement system that sends data from external websites to Facebook, ostensibly for the purpose of allowing targeted advertisements and allowing users to share their activities with their friends.

Facebook Beacon actions include purchasing a product, signing up for a service, adding an item to a wish list, and more.

Beacon enables your brand or business to gain access to viral distribution within Facebook.

Facebook Polls

Get answers from only the people you want to reach.

You can accurately target your Polls by gender, age, location, interests, and other demographic data. Your poll will only be shown to the people who meet your criteria.

With the easy-to-use creation interface, you can create and deploy a single-question poll within minutes. The polls will immediately start showing up in your target audience's News Feeds where they can respond as soon as they log in to Facebook. Based on the level of activity at that time, your question could be answered by hundreds of people in as little as 30 minutes.

Facebook Platform

You can create applications that integrate deeply into Facebook, harness the power of the social graph, and create new opportunities for your business. Facebook Platform provides you with the tools to quickly create custom experiences for users to interact with your business and their friends while maintaining the look and feel of the Facebook interface.

You can create an authentic social experience for your users by integrating your current web site or web application directly with the Facebook

Facebook Insight

This is similar to Google Analytic. It gathers insights on who's engaging with your presence on Facebook and help get valuable metrics about your presence and promotion on Facebook. With Facebook Insights, you have access to data on activity, fan demographics, ad performance, and trends.

You can refine your Social Ad target demographics, budgets and creatives based on Insights data to increase traffic to your Facebook Page or website and use the data to adjust the content of your Page and optimize for increased engagement with your customers and fans.

Recommendations

Begin with creating a facebook page. Create a beacon so our users and clients can be a part of your bussiness page. Depending on the response we could create polls to get feed back from the users. Facebook insight will give you a regular update of the campaign and help you improve on your facebook ad.