Why You Should Care About Facebook

On February 4, 2004, an unsuspecting online community opened its cyber doors to the students of Harvard University. Within its first month of existence more than half of Harvard’s student body was a registered member of TheFacebook.com.

A little more than four and a half years later, the social networking juggernaut has dropped the “The” from it’s moniker and domain, opened itself up to the entire world, practically, and has more than 100 million active users across the globe.

“Eh, who cares?” you say. “It’s nothing but a bunch of college kids partying and taking pictures.”

Au Contraire! More than half of Facebook’s current users are outside of college, and the fastest growing demographic is the 25+ crowd.

If those stats aren’t enough to get your attention, consider that Facebook’s advertising platform lets you create a brand-specific Page that enables two-way interaction between the user and your brand, product, service, etc. Then consider you can reach the exact audience you want with relevant targeted ads that link directly to your Page or website. And everything’s measurable, too.

To illustrate, let’s pretend you own a store in Oklahoma City that sells moderately priced men’s business suits – and you’re going to call it Suit Yourself because you’re creative like that. You recognize that Facebook is a great vehicle for Suit Yourself to reach fresh college grads who need to look good for interviews and beyond on a budget.

To set your foundation, you create a customized Suit Yourself Page. This gives Facebook users an avenue to interact with your brand and become a Fan of it. You then create a Facebook ad. The first thing you notice is there are 151,560 Facebookers in Oklahoma City, and your eyes widen. But you remember this isn’t necessarily about reach, it’s about relevance. So you narrow it down to male college grads, younger than 30, living in OKC. That cuts it to 9,960.

Targeting that down with keywords “graduating, school, college, intern, job hunting, business, The Office, politics” brings your audience to 2,500. That means your ad for affordable business suits will reach the 2,500 people that are likely to be the most receptive to it. When they click on the ad, they’ll shoot over to your Page and see that they do indeed need to suit themselves with Suit Yourself.

Before you rush headlong into throwing out your own Facebook ad campaign (because it really is just about as simple as it sounds), you should realize that there are some intangibles at play here – defining and understanding your target comes to mind, as does saying the right thing in the right way, as well as understanding the Facebook platform and network, and being honest about whether or not a Facebook presence is actually beneficial to your business or product. All of that, of course, is where we come in.

But the moral of this story isn’t that Traction knows how to establish a Facebook presence and is able to run a Facebook ad campaign. The moral here is learning never to say, “Who cares?” when you’ve got 100 million people waiting on you to care.