The State of Facebook Marketing in 2006
As of this spring Facebook is still closed to the public, running only on school and workplace networks. Here's what that means for outside marketers.
It’s worth being precise about where Facebook stands this spring, because the platform most marketers picture doesn’t exist yet. There’s no open registration. There’s no dedicated business Page product. What exists is a fast-growing network still restricted to school and, increasingly, workplace affiliation, and most businesses reading this literally cannot create a presence on it yet.
Growth is real but the door is still closed
Facebook started as a Harvard-only site in February 2004, expanded to other universities within months and added high school networks last September. This year it’s begun rolling out workplace networks as well, letting employees of specific companies join with a verified work email. Each expansion has grown the user base meaningfully, but every path in still requires a specific affiliation. There is no general sign-up form.
MySpace is still the larger story
For any business trying to reach a broad consumer audience through a social network right now, MySpace remains the bigger opportunity by raw numbers, with tens of millions of accounts against Facebook’s much smaller, more tightly bounded user base. Facebook’s advantage isn’t scale yet, it’s density: within a given campus or company, adoption is often close to universal, which makes it a fundamentally different kind of network than MySpace’s sprawling, open one.
Advertising exists but only in a limited form
Facebook has a self-serve ad product, still known as Flyers, that lets advertisers target by network, school, employer or region. It’s a precise targeting mechanism, sharper in some ways than anything available on the open web, but the audience it reaches is still small and skewed heavily toward students. It’s not yet a channel that can carry meaningful reach for most businesses.
Businesses are working around the access problem
A handful of companies with real campus or workplace ties, campus bookstores, local businesses near specific universities, are already active within the networks they qualify for, mostly through personal-style profiles and Groups rather than anything built for commercial use. It’s improvised, and it works at a small scale precisely because the audience within a given network is unusually engaged with each other.
What to watch for next
Facebook’s trajectory so far, from one campus to hundreds to workplaces, points in one direction: broader access is coming, even if nobody’s confirmed exactly when or what it will look like. The businesses paying attention now, understanding how tightly-bound networks behave differently from an open platform like MySpace, will be better prepared than the ones who wait until the doors are fully open to start learning the platform.
More strategy coverage is here, along with everything published in 2006 and the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
