Entrepreneur Solo

Facebook had a conference this week which might well change the landscape of the internet as we know it. Just in case you didn’t know here are a couple of facts about Facebook:

1) There are over 400 million people on Facebook.
2) They are all throwing sheep at each other and poking on a regular basis. (Basically this means they are actually on the site and doing stuff and interacting with the aps)
3) Facebook allows adverts.

Even if you do not know any more about Facebook or like me, just didn’t get it, these facts should be enough to stimulate your interest if you are a marketer or business person. When you sign up to Facebook you give them some information about your name, age, place you live, interests etc… Most people fill in the basics and leave it at that. Now, Facebook uses these demographics to serve up its ads. An example of this would be that as I am in Spain I might only want to serve that ad to people in Spain, giving me a grand total of around 8 million people. I might then want to refine it to people in Spain who put down English as their default language, 220,000 users. Not too shabby. The refinements can go on until you may find that you are actually targetting your ad to just a handful of people.

There as one big flaw though. This demographic, although good, lacked information because when people sign up for online services they don’t tend to put lots of information because of the Big Brother fear, “I don’t want them to have all of my information”.

Now things have changed.

Every time you Like something on Facebook it will be added into your profile. Maybe you join the “You Know You Have Lived In Spain” group. Well now that will go into your profile details. Maybe you joined a group liking a certain type of ice cream, that too would be dded in. Do you think ice cream companies will be interested in that information?

Get the idea?

This means that now if you are doing advertising on Facebook your target audience will be even more refined than before because the demographic targetting can be laser focussed to people who are interested in what you are offering.

Why is this important? Well which type of ads do you prefer, google’s text ads or Facebook’s colourful picture ads? Or don’t you care? The main point here is that suddenly Facebook is looking to take a lot of Google’s market share of online advertising. Search on Facebook should also become more interesting because people are spending their time there. Twitter also comes into the equation of course for search but that is another article.

By the way if you “Like” this article go below to “Like” it on Facebook. I have a cool new widget below thanks to Paul Russel. You can get the code there to paste it into your website. Do it to all the posts you read on this blog and Houses for sale in Spain and make me a happy boy. (It might also just lead to a large spike in traffic

Related articles by Zemanta. For more information about just this topic

• f8′s implications for marketers (jburg.typepad.com)
• How Facebook plans to dominate the Web (macworld.com)
• Spain giving away travel on Facebook (gadling.com)

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Big Brother, Demographics, Facebook, Facebook ads, Facebook profile demographics, Google, Online Advertising, Social network, Spain on Facebook, Twitter, Website, You know you have lived in Spain when