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Why Facebook matters

Thu, October 11th, 2007 by Tom Cochran | 0 comments

2007 has been the year of Facebook. There are currently 40 million registered users, growing at 100,000 new users a day and 50% of these return to Facebook on a daily basis, spending an average of 22 minutes on the site. These are astounding number, placing Facebook in the upper echelon of sticky sites. It's currently the eighth most popular site in the U.S. and the most popular site in Canada. What do these numbers mean? Well clearly, it means there is a huge audience that is growing at an astronomical pace. The users keep coming back to Facebook on a daily basis because the information being presented to them is both compelling and personalized.

For those of you that aren't familiar with Facebook, or more specifically, the Facebook News Feed, it's basically a simple way for you to passively stay up-to-date with the lives of your friends, showing a personalized list of news stories relating to their daily activities. This aggregation of personalized social network information being presented to the user in an the easily digestable news feed is the critical component to Facebook's stickiness and overall success. The Facebook recipe does what Friendster and MySpace were unable to do, and that's what attracts and keep users coming back.

The second component that was a stroke of brilliance was realizing that they couldn't possibly build all the quality social utility applications internally. Opening up the Facebook Platform shifted the burden of innovation onto the development community. Facebook has found a great hook to keep people coming back to their site and the fact that they have an audience of 40 million and growing is why they matter.

Now imagine if you could get the attention of one percent of Facebook's user base. You could then make 400,000 people aware of your issue or campaign. This is the path that we are going down with the Facebook application we built called iConcur. iConcur allows users to create issue petitions within Facebook, append YouTube videos, and share issues with their social network. The application users can then choose to support or oppose petitions. Through the power of the Facebook News Feed, friends will be made aware when people in their network support or oppose an iConcur petition, and this can pique their interest in viewing the petition themselves. This passive, word-of-mouth marketing of issue petitions through the News Feed is an extremely powerful way to spread your message virally through Facebook's social network.

The second, more compelling reason to adopt iConcur as a method of gathering support is the wealth of demographic information that is available through Facebook. If you have five thousand supporters of your iConcur petition, it's tremendously valuable for you to be able to drill down and find out that 36% of these supporters came from Dallas and that 8% are between 25 and 35. Any demographic information available on a user's Facebook profile is available to analyze at the aggregate level, giving you a clear snapshot of the individuals supporting your cause. Alternatively, you can see the same demographic information for those opposing your petition and potentially come up with a strategy to first understand why they oppose your issue, and then address their concerns.

Take a minute to read about our Facebook app on our website, or see if for yourself by installing it in your own profile by going to apps.facebook.com/iconcur/ 

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