Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

There’s certainly been alot of hype surrounding Facebook over the past year, what with the implied $15B valuation and entire venture capital funds being set up just to invest in Facebook apps. Anecdotally I can tell you my wife can spend hours on the site uploading photos, chatting with friends, and the like and both my brothers (age 18 and 27) are huge fans as well. So what does this mean to web publishers in terms of marketing potential? I’ll share my experience in two areas of Facebook marketing: advertisements and applications.

Advertisements are the most straightforward form of Facebook marketing since most internet marketers will already be familiar with the procedure of setting budgets, CPCs, etc. Facebook isn’t much different in terms of the mechanics of starting a campaign and we were up and running quickly with the $5 daily budget minimum for a mountain bike ad campaign. The ads themselves are a combination image and text ad which is different from what you’ll see on sites like Google and Yahoo. However, Facebook ads aren’t necessarily keyword based like search engine ads. For example, our ad set-up says “You are targeting men between 16 and 34 years old in the United States who like Mountain Biking.”

The biggest difference we’ve seen in our Facebook leads vs. leads generated on Google Adwords and other paid campaigns is that the Facebook users typically view more pages on our site and are more likely to create an account. We’re paying roughly the same CPC as on other ad networks and getting more pageviews - so far so good! The higher pageviews could be because Facebookers are familiar with the Review App model - sharing photos, reviews, etc. - so they are more likely to contribute and become involved on our site than typical search engine users strictly seeking information.

(The Facebook ad manager)

The other, sexier, form of Facebook marketing revolves around applications. Facebook applications are widgets that users can add to their profiles and provide interactive features like quizzes, photo uploads, and the like. Users can then share their applications and (hopefully) your application will go ‘viral’ as it is passed among friends. Creating a Facebook application is much more involved than running an ad campaign but a programmer can generally have a simple application up and running within a couple days. There is no cost to developing and deploying your application on the Facebook platform.

We’ve created two of our own Facebook applications and we’re very happy with the marketing results. Our first application, Mountain Biker, has been installed by more than 500 mountain bikers and lets users keep track of the mountain bike trails they’ve ridden. The application includes a competitive feature as well to see who has ridden the most trails which (ideally) keeps users engaged and incentivized to pass the app on to their friends. Mountain Biker has sent considerable traffic to our own website and has provided a tremendous branding opportunity to users who might not already know about us. The best thing is we spent nothing (other than a little time) creating the app yet it continues to be passed around among our most likely customers.

(Mountain Biker application users on Facebook)

There is some evidence that long-time Facebook users are suffering from application burnout as they install more and more applications that are just subtle variations on old themes. It’s important to make sure your application concept is fresh but also keep in mind that now is the time to launch your app before interest wanes and the spammers take over. If you’re looking for a new way to reach 18-34 year olds, Facebook is certainly a great option - get it while it’s hot!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 7:41 am and is filed under Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.