Why do people like to use Facebook?

Facebook became part of our everyday life. Sometimes when we get up in the morning we check what our friends are up to even before going to the bathroom.

As most of the people, I’m sure that you want to know how Facebook, the biggest social media site can help you boost your online business. You can be a CPA marketer or an affiliate, you can be the seller of your own products or a consultant offering social media services … really doesn’t matter, as Facebook is the place to be an use for marketing.

The starting point of your marketing should be to understand why millions of users are on Facebook and they love every minute of it sharing their life and business experiences contributing to the growth and development of this online phenomenon.

The Facebook profiles offer marketers insights into the likes and dislikes of potential customers. This is beyond what any research company can do in terms of detail level because the users bare their souls to friends and acquaintances with unguarded and trusting remarks which can’t be obtained in a regular research process. Basically, this is the kind of environment Facebook fosters becoming a place where people can say what they feel without any fear of looking foolish.

As the fortune favours the brave and courageous, any business willing to reflect this community spirit of trust, openness and transparency of meaning can look forward to build a brand by using special relationships with Facebook users.

Facebook achieved as milestones 500 million users, than very fast 600 million users and the numbers are still growing each and every day. 7 out of every 10 users are actually spending at least 30 minutes of their time everyday for varying reasons. If we compare this with members of a site or forum where only around 30% are active, this means that only 30% post or contribute to the overall discussions.

SocializeYourBusiness.com offers a free report about social media in 2011. You can download it for free here.

Curs Open Social Media pentru companii 21 mai 2010 - slide-uri

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Social Media Framework

Have you ever thought about your social media framework?

Social media framework aids comprehension of workflow experiences by describing their components, it also optimizes social media workflow in an easier way since a framework may include components that are applicable to them all.

Why is it crucial that we care about this? Simply because badly designed processes lead to the slow and inefficient response of your audience, ineffective communication, wasted time, disappointing experiences and poor degree of engagement. (Not to mention driving yourself to nowhere) Here is how I do it:

Word Sharing: Share news resources, tools, best practices, tips and guides through social bookmarking platforms.
Twitter: Use it heavily for different purposes such as, RT useful links, WOM, spread the news, share insights with professionals, learn what is hot now, real-time conversations, gain more affluence and traffic in your social networking platforms, support interesting initiatives, building an outstanding reputation being taken into account in the field I work on, promote your blog, look for trends topics, getting ideas and enlightening tips from brilliant people.
Your effort and sacrifice deserves being showed and shared for the benefit of others: Posting papers, concepts, frameworks, reports, projects, strategies, marketing plans or campaigns I’ve developed, so the job people can get insights from them.
Knowledge don’t belongs to you nor me, but to the universe: Spread what you know, share what others shared with you, teach what you’re good at, learn from everybody, write about how you put in practice these campaigns or explain how you reached that conclusion, which made you successful, but above all, quote your resources!
LinkedIn: Use it insistently for giving and receiving feedback, reading interesting posts, and comment on them. Find your key connections and engage with them, share ideas in the groups discussions, also participating in Q&A (either giving advice or receiving it). This should increase your visibility and it will improve the chances of being contacted.
Facebook: Aim it to talk and engage with your friends. Create lists, giving a different degree of permission to your crowd and segmenting the information according to the content you usually share with them.
The Wave: Use Google Wave for collaborative tasks, developing projects, exchanging ideas, brainstorming, conceptualizing campaigns and seeing how others can enhance your work.
Timing: Your blog, Do you love it? No? You must, because it’s the place where all your efforts, time, money and even romantic relationships are going to end up. All you do on Social Media has being meaningful to your blog. If not, I suggest you may want to reconsider your strategy. Give him a personality, a sense of humor, a purpose, a regularity, a bottle of Möet if he wants it and you’ll have your reason to give the very best of yourself in this URL.
Managing and optimizing: It is essential to define your strategy, set your goals and to monitor your results but, it is vital not to be overwhelmed by its magnitude. Hence, write down every procedure, pattern or system you follow to implement your social media workflow and start developing a schedule with all the tasks you performs every day, together with the time spent, the activities, the allowance, restrictions, and of course, deviations.
Plan for failure: If it doesn’t work, try changing and adjusting things to your needs. I know how it works to me, for you instead it can be slightly different. Be aware that you need to have hundred of bad ideas to have 1 or 2 great ideas. Do you get the idea?
Guest post @Israel Garcia blur-marketing.com

The Facebook history

Here is the short history of Facebook, the biggest social networking site from the planet. What begins as an online place for college students to know each other has been transformed into a global online phenomenon.

Facebook, or TheFaceBook as it was called at the beginning was launched in 4th of February, 2004.

Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard University student started the site as a way for his fellow students from Harvard to get to know each other. At that time, the site was opened only for certain students and it wasn’t perceived as a business even it has funds at disposal. Mark saw this website as an alternative to spend more wisely the time after school. Mark was still in the school when the site started to grow at an incredible rate. As to discuss the initial funders, they received money from individuals like Peter Theil, Accel Partners, Greylock partners and from the advertising deals with Microsoft and iTunes.

The students which were members started to recommend Facebook to other students and the fellows from other universities started to have possibility to join the site. Until 2006, Facebook was not open to the public.

After the site was live for a period, Mark brought for helping to grow the site Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. A fem months later, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz dropped Harvard to concentrate on growing Facebook. Facebook, as we know it today was started in August 2005 when the company bought the domain Facebook.com with 200,000 USD from a company called About Face.

In 2006 we find Facebook facing a tremendous growth. Many more school, universities and businesses started to be part of the network. Starting with September 2006, anyone above 13 years old is eligible to have an account on Facebook. Being part of na network wasn’t a requirement anymore.

In March 2006 there were rumours about a potential acquisition of Facebook by Google. They made an offer for 750 million USD but the Facebook management dropped it because they thought of 2 billion USD.

Microsoft was also on the short list of potential acquisitors, but in the end they just bought 1,5% from shares and started a huge advertising contract with Facebook.

When things started to look tremendous, ConnectU, another Harvard based social networking site claimed that the founder of Facebook stole some of the codes from their software. In the end, the lawsuit was dropped and Facebook started to move forward.

The idea of community was at the base right from the beginning and it is also now, even if the
site is much, much bigger. All players, the developers, personal users and business users understood how important is to keep the spirit of community alive both for Facebook success and their own.

The Facebook team is very interested to make their community happy and that’s why they add new features all the time and if they identify new needs from customers, to fulfill them.This web 2.0 site is a great resource for your social media marketing efforts so include it in your marketing weapons.