Raven Culture™ Blog

I am sure you have heard of FaceBook, everyone has, but have you used it? Well if you are one of the 250 million active users of FaceBook the answer will be “ahh durr!” but if you have not taken the plunge into it yet, why not? I guarantee that you will find people on there that you know, plus all of the people that you may dislike and don’t want to talk to, but you just block those ones…

I must admit, I was at first hesitant at creating my own FaceBook profile. But eventually I gave it a try and never looked back.

FaceBook is a great way to keep in touch with people that you may not see too often, I will admit that for some people it is the only social interaction they have, but for the healthy ones, it can be a quant way of keeping in touch and meeting new people.

All you have to do is remember to log in and update your profile with some note or anecdote about your life. The typical post would go like this “Iain is hungry” or “Iain wonders the meaning of life” for example. Your friends will eventually find you and ask to be your friend on FaceBook, you accept and then you can see their notes or anecdotes. You make comments on theirs and they make comments on yours and the fun begins.

Is that all? You may ask. Well, no… on top of the basics of keeping people up to date on your life, and being updated on others, you can also upload your photos into galleries for your friends to view, chat to your friends live, and write stories for people to read, for a start. But on top of that, there are scores of nerds worldwide developing applications for the FaceBook website. My apologies to those of the nerd fraternity, but you know what you are. These applications can be a lot of fun, and I have spent, perhaps, too much time playing some of the fun little games that are available for free on FaceBook.

Now that is all well and good, but how can you take advantage of all of this?

Finding new mediums to promote your business is hard. All of the good angles have already been done to death, and newspaper advertisements are so Stone Age these days. So where can you break into a market that is largely untapped and in most cases, unheard of, by mainstream business?

You could try Google Adwords and get your business at the top of Google searches, but then you would have to pay $3 – $15 per click to get any real presence there, where else can you go where there are hundreds of millions of people online?

The answer is somewhere you have heard of but probably don’t completely understand. It is of course, FaceBook. With more than 250 million active users (http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics) and a growing demographic of those 35 years old and older, it’s not hard to get your business name in front of a lot of people today. And it is not like those people just check it quickly and leave, there are more than 5 billion minutes spent on FaceBook each day worldwide.

From those statistics you would think that there would be advertisers lining up and down the street to get their ads in front of that many people. But no.
While there is a huge amount of advertisers on FaceBook, there are none of any substance. The quality of advertisers needs to be raised, and it will once it catches on. But if you are quick and act now you can get your business advertising on FaceBook for a ridiculously low cost. While Google can charge you up to $15 or more per click, FaceBook ads can cost less than a dollar per click, based on the demographic you select.

Both Adwords and Facebook let you control this amount, but unlike Adwords you can literally get started for a few cents, while you can do this on Adwords, your ads won’t show until you enter an amount that puts enough weight on it for it to display.

And that is the other thing, if you want your ads to be displayed to 35 year old, investment bankers who live in Brisbane CBD and are interested in German Sports Cars, you can! Because FaceBook has so much personal information about its users, you can target your ads right down to the exact type of person you are wanting to market to.

Not interested in paying for advertising on FaceBook? No worries, why not create a Fan page! Basically you create a Fan page and people become fans of it. What does that mean? Well, say I become a fan of your page, that notification “Iain is now a fan of Red Basketball Hoops”, for example, is displayed on my profile page, my 100 or so friends will see that I have become a fan, they in turn become a fan and so on.

This is great if you have a product that you can promote, and it helps if it is cool or popular, I am not sure people will become a fan of “Strategic Marketing Strategies in the South Pacific” but if you are selling digital camera’s and you have a good brand, this can be a way of promoting your brand at no cost.

So it’s food for thought really, most businesses would jump at a chance to get into an untapped market, but its up to you. Start investigating this for your self and see if it is truely suitable for your business needs. There are heaps of websites out there that offer advertising, this is just one of them, and you need to make the decision for yourself as to which media is the right one.