Why Facebook matters to business

Wednesday, March 24, 2010 | Posted by: Fiona Cullinan
Categories: Business advice, Media sector | Tags: business, Alex Connock, entrepreneurs, media, digital, Ten Alps, online, social media, Facebook, tool, Coca-Cola, Aston Martin, Barclays Football, Ning, Google News, Disney, monopoly

Alex Connock, CEO, Ten Alps: At last Sunday’s match between Manchester United and Liverpool, up flashed an advert on the hoardings for Barclays Football’s Facebook page. It runs competitions; it drives traffic to both Barclays’ premier league site and indeed www.barclays.com; and it has 97,541 fans. Sorry, 97,546 – five more came on in the two minutes I was on there.

With Facebook catching Google up last week in the US for page visits, social networking has completed its transition from a bit of online fun to bona fide media outlet and business tool. According to Hitwise, the market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% for the week ending 13 March, compared to the year before.

That’s reflected in all sorts of areas. Take the professional development website Teachers TV  – a site in the running of which we have a role. It used its Facebook page for a competition to find Britain’s best Teaching Assistant, the fan page alone generating 15,700 video views, never mind the traffic it drove back to the site itself. (We have one too at Ten Alps for our programming news.)

• Aston Martin has 244,329 fans.
• Coca Cola has 5.2million and if you click to enter you get an app download.
• Disney is at 3.3million.
• The Hangover had more than 10,000 fans on a site just dedicated to quotes from the film, never mind marketing it. (‘Next week’s no good for me. The Jonas Brothers are in town.’).

The value is clear: fans are connected, literally, to the brand, and their wider interests are there for marketeers to see on their own Facebook pages.

Meanwhile in the hard-to-tell category, have a look at this one for Bulgarian Persil. 

And the reason for the value is about sunk cost. Facebook, with its 400 million registered users, has the power to create instant aggregation, to give your product immediate value in social media.

Contrast that with even the most targeted startup, even one using a great off-the-shelf networking tool like Ning. There, users have to create and remember a new username and login, and live through that indeterminate period between inception of a social media site and it reaching critical mass. (People are already writing academic articles on that.)

The value of Facebook’s natural monopoly position is mathematically compelling.

The US industry website PC World (not the terminally depressing out-of-town UK shop) highlights how the kind of ‘connected’ traffic Facebook has could also be high value for small and medium-sized corporate advertisers. In particular, among the top five Print Media websites in the week ending 6 March 2010, 78 per cent of Facebook.com users were returning visitors compared to 67 per cent from Google News. This is an audience that sticks.

Not always in a good way, and there is corporate reputation at stake any time you open up a corporate site to comment. Last week Nestlé was hit by a surge of ‘anti-social media’ (as the inevitable phrase had it) with critics arriving en masse on its company page to accuse it of unethical practices. The administrator seems to have played it well – showing the kind of tolerance that Howard Webb showed when refereeing United/Liverpool. For instance, he responded to messages about the extinction of orang-utans by saying: “Get it off your chest – we’ll pass it on.”

Anti-social, or social, Facebook is at least a media form where the audience can remember how to tune in. I have a list of my usernames for all the various sites I’ve ever logged onto. I have over 40, and here’s the problem: I’ve forgotten them all – except Facebook.

Image: Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook © Brian Solis, www.briansolis.com and bub.blicio.us

Alex Connock, CEO, Ten Alps reports on the media industry for the Grant Thornton ‘Elevate for business leaders’ blog -– read more posts by Alex Connock.