Facebook-rexia

One of the many experiences at the agency is that we get to go to cool places like the Facebook offices in London. We got an opportunity to find out a bit more about the world of Facebook straight from their employees.


Firstly, lets recap some facts about Facebook;
845 million monthly active users at the end of December 2011.
Approximately 80% of monthly active users are outside the U.S. and Canada.
483 million daily active users on average in December 2011. 
425 million monthly active users who used Facebook mobile products in December 2011.

Mark Zuckerburg's First profile

Mark Zuckerburg's very first Facebook page contained very basic information, it was designed for 'elevator chat', information that you would usually share with people when you are just getting to know them; Name, where do you work, how old are you etc. Now, however, Facebook pages allow for a much deeper conversation where the it limitless to the information you can convey: what music you like, activities you have been doing recently, interactions with other friends, photos of what you have been doing etc. You can imagine that the demand for content is massive, therefore there are some very smart engineers, in America I presume, managing all this data.... a tricky job I would think....

Now more than ever, people check Facebook almost as soon as they get up, average time is something ridiculous like 5 minutes. This Facebookrexia is very much a very wide spread condition - in fact, a Burgler got caught by police after he had left him self logged in after checked his Facebook account on the house computer - true story!

Facebook has also allowed for social and political movements around the world. The people of Colombia formed a march against the Colombian rebel group FARC, the Facebook group started in Colombia which then transpired around the world. The day of the march, hundreds of thousands of people marched in Colombia, whilst other marches took place around different cities around the globe; Canada, London etc. The response was unprecedented, all from just one Facebook page. This goes to show how successful the social network is at providing a global platform to express your anger and feelings. 

The point of our visit was not only to be able to 'check-in' at Facebook, but we were also there to see how Facebook can be incorporated into our advertising campaigns and how it can help. Facebook is social by design - puting people at the beginning of the campaign process. A good example of this is the Photo ability that Facebook enabled on the site. At the time, Facebook was diversifying into a very cluttered market where companies like Flickr and Photobucket led the way. The photo tool was really bad, clunky and compressed the image so much that it was so small and very low res... and despite all this it was the top site for uploading photos as Facebook did something very different from their competitors - they allowed people to tag the people in their photos, which generated a method of sharing the photos easily. 

Another advancement in this social process is the link-up of Ticketmaster and Facebook. In the U.S at the moment, Ticketmaster has teamed with Facebook so that when people are buying a ticket to an event they can see which friends are going and where they are sitting! Brilliant! We are tentative for it to be released over here... another addition to our social interactions! 

Ticketmaster with Facebook social plug-in

With all this focus on social interaction and the fact that Facebook has an army of data available to them, they have a lot of well-targeted advertising propositions. Facebook in fact  have their own targeting tool, whereby any member on the public can list to advertise on Facebook. The targeting is so specific that you as a user can enter in a demographic and Facebook will generate the number of people available in that demographic - the below picture shows that there are 9,697,280 men aged 25-44. This can be a perfect addition to any on-line advertising campaign whether it needs to be very specific or generic targeting.

Facebook Targeting Tool

The only difference with advertising with Facebook, is the creative has to be right. A Facebook profile is a very personal thing to many people, where loud adverts would not be welcomed. Instead, Mark Zuckerburg has made a point that advertisement on Facebook cannot be intrusive - the adverts have to blend into the profile and cannot be obvious - the picture to the left shows a good example from Ben and Jerry's. At the moment you have many adverts down the right hand side of the profiles which are by no means inconspicuous, but Facebook is starting to get clever with their advertising.... if a user becomes a fan of a page or expresses a 'like' for a certain product, that brand can create adverts that will appear in their news feed - equally they can do this even if they have not become a fan but likely to like the brand. In terms of the creative, content is everything! The most successful adverts on Facebook are usually video content or photos - this creates a better reaction from their audience and in turn has the opportunity for huge amounts of earned media. 

Brands can also create pages for their consumers to engage with, this is the only chance where brands can have a much deeper conversation with their customers. This is a brilliant opportunity to build brand relations and get people to 'fan' your brand. Obtaining 'fans' though, are not the be all and end all as some brands focus to heavily on getting fans - the focus should also be driving people to purchase your product and keep them returning.

Some successful pages are the Skittles Pages http://www.facebook.com/skittles?ref=ts and Kit-Kat Chunky http://www.facebook.com/kitkatuk.

It is fair to say a lot got learnt at our trip to Facebook and we wish them the very best of luck in this exciting time for them.

Lesson 12: The legend is true, Sean Parker (founder of Napster) removed the 'The' from the title 'The Facebook'. 

Fiona, me and Chiara at Facebook, London