The Rise of Facebook
Blogged By: Low Hang Wei @ March 12th, 2008 - 1:12 amIt was not long ago that I signed up for a Facebook account and I seem to be behind most of the human race when it comes to becoming a Facebooker or whatever term they call it. The initial resistance to join Facebook was caused by a pre-misconception that it’s similar to Friendster and that all social networking sites are about the same. It wasn’t until I was talking to someone and he was saying how important it is to have a Facebook account if you are interested in starting a Business.
Slightly intrigued by his words, I decided to sign up for a Facebook account. When I signed into my Facebook account for the first time, I was greeted with a similar interface as Friendster, except that there seems to be quite a lot of applications. Then I began to realize why Facebook is so popular and why the founder is the world’s youngest billionaire. His idea was simple, but nobody thought of it before him.
He understands one simple fact that a social networking site is difficult to incorporate all features that users may want. Therefore, he just comes up with the same features as a basic social networking site and build up an API that allows third party developers to write applications to be used with Facebook. It helps Facebook to grow much faster in terms of the features that they can provide, such as in-Facebook games, greeting cards and anything else that third party developers come up with. Therefore, without doing any additional work, Facebook has something interesting coming up each and every day and that helps in boosting the return rate.
From that moment, I also understand why is Facebook recommended for Business Development. It really does seem to help a lot if you intend to go into Public relations to promote your business. For example, when you’re in the process of developing something new, you can have a facebook group to keep interested parties updated your progress. The benefits of facebook over a blog is that someone may have many interesting things to look out for and he may easily forget your blog. With facebook, it’s an integrated notification of all your interests and easy to manage.
Additionally, to bring things one step forward, it’s possible to develop applications to gather more interest. For example, we see a lot of quizzes that’s hot on Facebook. I’m certain that it helps the developer engage in very effective viral marketing, since Facebook automatically shows it when your friends adds certain applications. The viral effect is just explosive.
I now see why so many people are addicted to Facebook, some to poker, Super Wall, quizzes or other games. The point is simple: Facebook has the audience, can you come up with something to cater to this audience and bring your business one step forward?
Blogged Under: Internet Marketing, Business Development
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March 14th, 2008 at 7:50 am
Facebook does help to promote your business. However the latter is only true for certain kind of business. People who uses facebook belongs to a specific category of people. If your business client is targeted towards people of late 30s to 40s who are working in the management, they probably won’t have time for Facebook, neither would they be interested in the applications like fluff-friends. When they’ve free time they probably would want to sleep or spend more time with family. On the other hand, if your business is targeted towards secondary to tertiary students, facebook is an excellent platform. That would also mean that the products/ services you’re selling has to be within their budget
March 18th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
Not only student, i think alot of young working adult are using facebook while working cos we see this “weekend” effect…where during weekend thee are less users.
(went for a php gathering, and a facebook game developer showed his charting on usage).