Saturday, January 17, 2009

The FaceBook Phenomenon

It was only last October when I finally got around to creating a facebook profile. My sole intention for doing so was to learn the intricacies of this social networking site for business purposes. As I grew my network of friends, many of them took the opportunity to break my chops about being late to the party. One of my friends even said, “Welcome to 2006.” OK, so I was a bit late to embrace but I am a quick study so I’ll get moving and catch right up.

I started doing searches for friends, colleagues, old classmates, etc and found that many of they were not yet on FB. I wasn’t as far behind as I thought. Well over the last 3 months I have been blown away by the number of people that have just started their profile and are beginning to accumulate friends and build their network. And the demographics are really expanding. This is not just a teen thing like MySpace. Just goes to show that grow ups can play too.

So what’s the phenomenon? In my opinion, the growth numbers are really impressive. According to the statistics found in the FB press room, they have over 150 million active users (defined by logged in within the last 30 days). More than half the users are outside of college and the fastest growing demographic is over the age of 30. The average user has 100 friends and there are over 3 billion minutes spent on FB each day. Here is the stat that surprised me; over 70% of the FB audience is outside the US. That tells me that the growth rate will continue as the US audience gets onboard. So I really wasn’t that late to the party…

While these numbers are pretty amazing, my favorite part of FB is the behavior. I have connected with friends from elementary school, high school, college and of course, my business colleagues. And no matter what our relationship was then, now it is nothing but pleasantries and genuine excitement to connect. Seems like everyone is on their best behavior and why not, it’s all public and we all want to be liked! We are organizing reunions, sharing pictures of our kids, telling old war stories and, here’s the kicker, doing business. Yes, I said it. We are using FB to find business & job opportunities. We are connecting with influential people and using this public domain to ask for help in advancing our careers and businesses.

Don’t believe it? Fine by me but at least I did my part in sharing my opinion. In the words of Judge Smails from Caddy Shack, “The world needs ditch diggers too.”

Companies are going to have to really start embracing FB and its power. I’ll begin sharing some of my thoughts and ideas for business marketing on FB in the weeks to come. As always, comments welcome.