According to Facebook’s advertising statistics, the social network now has more than 325 million users.
And it’s not slowing down.
Facebook’s stats are hard to believe. I have a hard time grappling with some of the statistics myself (all stats below are from Facebook.com):
- 50 percent of Facebook’s active users log in every day
- 8 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day
- 10 million users become fans of pages each day
- 2 billion photos are uploaded each month
Looking at the statistics, it’s no wonder businesses are jumping on the Facebook bandwagon and trying to take advantage. In fact, over 86 percent of US Online Retailers currently use Facebook Fan Pages. (take a look at the graph to the right)
Despite the growth, there are a great deal of small businesses not joining the social network.
Allow me to go over 5 reasons why you can’t ignore Facebook anymore:
- Your market is probably on Facebook. With over 325 million users, the numbers are compelling. We’re spending more time on Facebook and the age demographic of users is on the rise. Eight billion minutes spent every day on the site? Try and get some of those minutes to be spent with your prospects and customers interacting with YOU.
- Stay on their radar. By pushing out valuable content through your publisher on your Facebook page, that content will be pushed into your fans’ news feed. Of course, you want the content to be relevant and valuable, otherwise they will ignore it and even worse, de-fan you.
- Embed branded content. Facebook pages give you the option to embed custom graphics or flash files being served outside of Facebook. Just take advantage of FBML (Facebook Markup Language, a subset of HTML) and you have a branded page.
- Leverage Facebook applications and widgets. There are literally thousands of different applications for Facebook that can be embedded into Facebook pages. You can even build your own custom applications.
- See the data with Facebook Insights. Talk about measuring your ROI! Facebook gives you a number of analytical data sets to show you how you are engaging and who you are engaging with. Tie that data to Google Analytics and you’ve got yourself a powerful platform to measure success.
What do you think are some of the best benefits of having your own business Facebook page?