Facebook has some pretty awesome numbers; today they boast over 400 million active users, of which 200 million login every single day. Facebook users spend an average of 1 hour a day on Facebook and each user has an average of 130 friends. More than 60 million status updates areposted each day and 3 billion photos are uploaded to the site every month. But wait, there’s more. Enter the mobile Facebook user, or rather Facebook fanatic. Of those 400+ million users more than 100 million access Facebook via mobile devices (smart phones) like the iPhone, these uber users are twice as active on Facebook as the already impressively engaged non-mobile users.
In your Facebook
No matter how you slice it, there’s a whole lot of Facebooking going on and it’s no wonder why businesses want to get in on this social network feeding frenzy. So what is a business (brand, product, organization, public figure, artist or band) to do?
For starters, create a Facebook Page (http://ow.ly/19eM4). Having a Facebook Page lets a business exist in a fashion similar to a typical user profile and allows businesses connect and engage customers. Since your business page essentially acts like another friend to your connections, which in facebook lingo are called fans, bringing friends of those fans, that much closer to being fans of yours! Essentially this could be equated much like a giant ripple effect which keeps driving word-of-mouth to a wider and wider circle of fans, as your fans interact with your Facebook Page by commenting and linking to content on your Page (or posting on your Page depending how you have it configured) information spreads to their friends via News Feed.
If all this wasn’t enough to make you spring into action, as more than 1.5 million local businesses already have, I leave you with a few interesting figures pertaining to Facebook Pages to light the fire. More than 20 million people become fans of Pages each day which averages out to 4 Pages/month/user and the average user writes 25 comments on Facebook content each month. Those could be fans of your Page, and comments about your products, service, brand or business which could be rippling out across each fan’s network of an average of 130 friends. That’s a lot of potential word-of-month for showing up and sharing good content with an audience that’s probably well worth the effort.
In future posts we’ll introduce other Facebook features such as Facebook Share and Facebook Connect which offer additional opportunities for increasing exposure and engaging your audiences.
*statistics used in the article available are available here: http://ow.ly/19f6t