How involved should your start up business start up business be on Facebook? It’s a question that many entrepreneurs are asking these days. Is the time and effort involved in building a fan page and then updating it on a regular basis really worth it or does a good Google Ad words campaign still make more sense? While opinion is still somewhat divided there is one thing that is not in doubt –Facebook is huge and is growing every day. Here are a few rather astonishing facts about Facebook you may not have heard:
·Although Google still outranks in terms of the number of unique visitors it receives per day Facebook gets more actual page views than any other website in the world.
·With its 400 million plus (and counting) registered users if Facebook was a country in terms of population it would bethe third largest on the planet.
·It took the Internet as a whole five years to reach its first 50 million users. It took Facebook just two.
·4.5 billion (yes billion) updates are posted to Facebookon a weekly basis.
·Facebook delivers twice the amount of upstream traffic to news and media sites than Google does.
·100 million people have utilized FacebookConnect to share information with other websites. According to recent researchconsumers are 200% more likely to join or sign up to your website if they can use Facebook Connect to do so.
·33% of Facebook members are fans of “brands”. That’sa whopping 132 million people. Their primary reason for ‘liking” companies?Access to special offers and Facebook only deals.
·Facebook’s primary founder, Mark Zuckerburg, began Facebook in his Harvard dorm room (he later dropped out) in 2004. In 2010 he is one of the world’s youngest billionaires, with personal wealth of US$4billion. He’s 26 and still a bit geeky looking. If Facebook is nothing else it should be a little beacon of hope for struggling start up business owners everywhere.
Getting a good Facebook page together for your startup business does indeed take a bit of effort. However, if you look at the facts and figures presented above they do present a compelling case for taking the time to do so. Whether you do it yourself or outsource to one of the growing number of social media management companies that are springing up Facebook is a big part of the future of search, internet marketing (even for offline businesses) and life in general and if you aren’t on there yet, you need to get there soon.
