Categories: Articles

Facebook Facts That Will Blow Your Marketing Mind

At the CMA – Canadian Marketing Association – Digital Marketing Conference today and Mike Murphy – Vice-President Media Sales – for Facebook just finished his keynote address, The Power Of Social Media For Brands. He dropped some Facebook statistics that dropped some jaws (including mine).

1. The average Facebook user spends about twenty-one minutes plus per day at the online social network.
2. The average Facebook user visits four times per day.
3. Facebook is adding about three hundred and fifty thousand new users every day.
4. Just this morning Facebook surpassed fifty million worldwide community members.
5. Facebook’s size doubles every six months.

Interestingly, Canada does a little better for Facebook. The average Canadian Facebook user spends over thirty minutes on the site per day.

What also intrigued me was that sixty-five percent of Facebook users return the next day. As Murphy says, "that’s a sticky site."

Murphy also gave three things all Marketers must be aware when trying to to bring their brands into Facebook:

1. Be a part of the experience. Advertising in Facebook is effective, but integrating your brand and making it exciting for the Consumers is where Marketers are having the most success.
2. Maintain a daily dialogue. Nothing new to those who live and breathe Social Media. Conversations don’t happen when only one side is talking.
3. Give them a reason to share. This is a big one. A lot of time Marketers are trying to define how they will join the conversation. Murphy suggested something very similar to what I preach. It is important for companies to understand social media and the power of the channel, but one of the most effective things a Marketer can do is empower their consumers (and Brand Evangelists) to connect to one another by giving them stuff they can really use – and stuff they really want.

I was also reading the November 2007 issue of Wired Magazine on the flight over and caught an article called, Iconoclast – The mother of all Happy Macs gives the gifts of Web 2.0. It’s all abut Susan Kare – the person who was hired by Apple in 1983 to design the look and feel of the Macintosh interface. Her work included the development of the icons we’ve all come to know and use. Kare is now one of the people developing the gifts that you can buy and send to friends in Facebook. The price is usually about one dollar and they are limited editions. While the profile of Kare was fascinating, here’s what really took me by surprise:

"Launched last February, the site’s gift shop offers icons for every occasion, from balloons, puppies and champagne to mojitos, handcuffs, boom boxes, and a can labeled Whoop Ass. To date, users have exchanged more than 20 million virtual gifts, paying up to $1 for each, making them one of the site’s most successful revenue stream."

So, Facebook is not just a sticky Website… there’s a business model behind it. No matter how simple it may seem to us.

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.