Make Money Online With Snowboardjohn

There’s been a heated discussion recently about social networking website Facebook.

I’ve had several people email me to ask what I think.

First of all, I have to say, I don’t actively use facebook as a Lead gen/community tool for any market I operate in. However, I’ve assessed it thoroughly and understand what it’s purpose is in a Business process.

Facebook is a permission based community platform. It’s essentially like an “open to all friends” email inbox that supports a lot more media than simple text. Like video, audio, photo’s etc. This means your friends can spy on conversations you’re having with other people, and vice versa.

So let me break down what you’re dealing with in business terms:

First of all, let’s touch on Facebooks Demographic. While it’s hard to judge the demographic with complete accuracy, it’s currently likely that most users are 15-26, and a tiny amount are older tech savvy early adopters.

This makes sense to me, considering facebook was developed as a university only social platform before it was released to the general public.

Does this qualify it, or disqualify it as a tool? Not at all, but obviously it heavily affects the markets you would want to try and reach with it.

If you make money off of ringtones, Facebook is probably great - if you sell golf clubs, you probably want to give it a miss.

Secondly, let’s discuss Facebook as a marketing/community building tool.

I think it is quite suited to creating groups of people who have similar interests. After all, there are many public and private groups Facebookers participate in already.

However, I cannot see how Facebook would be superior to writing your own blog. The Facebook platform itself does not make self promotion any easier than promoting your own blog is. And creating awareness of yourself, and your business expertise is the hard part. You can make your own blog as functional as a Facebook page very inexpensively and easily. Add to that, that once you create this “awareness equity” in Facebook, you don’t REALLY OWN IT. It’s part of the Facebook platform.

You do however own your own domain name, and blog. The social proof available to you as Facebook users join your group is available to you on a blog - services like mybloglog.com make this very easy.

Thirdly, let’s discuss Facebook as a traffic tool.

I think this is where the biggest opportunities really lie.

Facebook application developers can potentially generate hundreds of thousands of visitors to their sites very quickly.

However, at the moment those applications are mostly related to Facebook development businesses. Not niche markets that use Facebook as a media to reach a non Facebook market. Just like the “Free Myspace Layouts” businesses.

Are they successful? Yes. Do they serve a market other than Facebook users who want a better/more personalized face book experience? No.

Therefore the traffic opportunity is not relevant for businesses that do not intend to target Facebook users in and of themselves as Facebook users.

My conclusion: is Facebook a viable business building tool?

Yes, in very narrow markets.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, September 8th, 2007 at 9:12 am and is filed under Make Money Online Tip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.