What audience has MORE viewers than the superbowl… everyday?
What medium is bigger than all of prime time… all the time?
Give up? It’s Facebook.
With more than 10 million users becoming fans of pages every DAY, it’s one of the fastest growing advertising mediums out there.
Yesterday I heard Sean Sullivan, midwest sales director at Facebook, speak at the Cleveland AAF (American Advertising Federation) luncheon. I wanted to learn more about how to use fan pages to brand and market with Facebook.
While Facebook is still not very effective with a b2b market, Sean had lots of successful case studies and ad statistics to share from big brand consumer products: Papa John Pizza, Starbucks, Honda.
Think about it. Facebook is word of mouth at its best. It’s got the 1-2-3 punch.
1) A trusted source (your friends)
2) Easy transmission (just a click and it propogates on your friend’s wall)
3) Add the ability to comment or snicker, share links, video and photos (status update/walls)
No wonder it’s growing like crazy.
When you make a fan page on Facebook and get people to become FANS, your advertising can be extremely targeted to an opt in group. And it can be so easily viral when someone comments on a friend’s wall, video, link or status update! Huge potential to segment. Think about it. Facebook has a big inventory of targeted keywords matched to their millions of users. They know your birthday, your hobbies, your interests, your friends, where you went to school, and what causes you support. And what ever you subscribe to, depending on your privacy settings, goes viral.
You could advertise to all the 21 year olds males in New York City who are having a birthday in one week.
Another example: when you sign up as a fan and get a freebie like a free pizza from Papa Johns, all your friends and find out when you tell them and they want to opt in to get a coupon for a free pizza too.
For example, it only took 11 days, some YouTube / TV ads and a bunch of burger coupons for TGIFriday’s to get 655,000 Facebook Fans subscribed to their fan page. Of course, it wasn’t without some bumps along the way, but now since the group has opted in, TGIFriday’s has a big fan base that it is “free” to communicate with.
The Facebook ad set up reminds me of a Google Adwords set up in many ways. URL, body copy, segmentation, daily budget. One big difference: a photo or image in the ad. That’s big. A photo has the ability to signficantly increase readership of an ad.
Also, because of the connectedness with the member users, the potential for going viral is huge. When 50% of the users log in every day and the average user spends 20 minutes a day on Facebook every day… and the demographics for growth are in the 35+ category; this is a medium to learn, test and use if you brand and market to consumers.
On Hitwise’s list of top 20 social networking sites, this week Facebook has 41% of the visits. Back in April, it was only 29% and Facebook was #2 to MySpace That’s growth! Yesterday afternoon it was announced Facebook reached 300 million users. Here. Here. and Here. And they are profitable.
Have you tried a Facebook ad campaign yet? What was the result? How are you using Facebook ads, the hottest new advertising tool? Everyone is looking for ROI and real numbers, if you’re willing to share! Send links to your case study or fan page or just leave comment.
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