The Value of Facebook

An interesting development has been happening at Facebook over the past several months. For years, Facebook appealed primarily to the high-school and college-age crowd. It was a great social networking site for the 18-25 age group. Facebook members could keep tabs on their friends and fellow fraternity brothers, viewing pics from the latest party or college event.

Broadening Its Users

Now, the developers at Facebook are creating tools to broaden the Facebook market. They are growing the developers API segment of the site at a rapid pace, creating innovative, user-friendly applications that appeal to the tech crowd. In addition, Facebook has entered into partnership with a major news network for the 2008 campaign. These new developments are helping the social utility site appeal to a larger market of web users.

When I first began using Facebook, I must admit, I wasn't terribly impressed with the site. But that was mainly because I am an Internet Marketing professional. Therefore, my interest in social media networks is largely contingent upon a site's use with respect to SEO and SEM. Since I did not see much value in Facebook for SEO/SEM, I didn't use it very much.

Building Networks

However, lately my opinion of the value of Facebook for SEO has changed. I have began growing my Facebook network, and I have started playing around with the Facebook Developers Platform. We have created an Internet Marketers Quiz, which is doing quite well for only having been up a few days. Three people have already taken the quiz, one of which was a web designer with whom we can now follow up with a newsletter promoting our products and services. Thus, the quiz has so far been a useful tool in terms of building interest in our products and services. Additionally, it makes a great tool for building an e-mail list.

We just recently joined one of the Facebook groups - the Visa Business Network - to promote our web products and services. The group provides $100 free credit for advertising, just for joining. Facebook resources like the Visa Business Network and the Developer APIs are proving to have value in enhancing our business online.

Name & Reputation Management

Furthermore, we have already found that Facebook is a great tool for name and brand reputation management. In our Guide to Social Media Optimization - a 28-page e-book our marketing team recently published - we discuss how to utilize Facebook to promote your website, business, name or brand in the search engines.

For all these reasons, it pays to learn about the many tools and resources Facebook has to offer.