Facebook Marketing: What Every Business Needs to Know
A decision framework for whether a business should invest in Facebook in 2008, weighing its fast-growing audience against the still-raw Beacon backlash.
Facebook opened up to businesses in a real way starting in November 2007, when it launched both Facebook Pages and an advertising platform in the same announcement. That same launch included Beacon, a feature that automatically published members’ purchases from partner sites into their friends’ news feeds, which triggered a public backlash serious enough that Facebook apologized within weeks and switched Beacon to an opt-in system by December. Any business weighing Facebook marketing in 2008 has to hold both facts at once: a large, fast-growing audience, and a platform still working out how far it can push before users push back.
The case for getting in now. Facebook’s user base was closing in on 100 million by the middle of 2008, up from roughly 20 million a year earlier, and the audience had already moved well beyond its college-only origins into a broader, older demographic. A Facebook Page was free to set up and gave a business a place to post updates that showed up in fans’ news feeds at no cost, something no other channel at the time offered for free at that kind of scale. For a business trying to reach a younger, digitally native customer, that reach was hard to find anywhere else.
The case for waiting. The Beacon episode showed that Facebook’s own instincts about user privacy weren’t fully settled, and a business associating itself too closely with a platform mid-controversy risked getting caught in whatever backlash came next. The advertising tools themselves were also immature: targeting options were basic, there was no reliable way to measure return on ad spend the way a business could with search advertising and the ad units themselves were small and easy to ignore.
Questions worth answering before committing budget. Does your actual customer spend time on Facebook, or is your audience concentrated somewhere else entirely, older customers in particular were still far more likely to be reached through search, email or their local newspaper’s website in 2008. Do you have the staff to post regularly and respond to comments, since an abandoned Page with a stale wall looks worse than no Page at all. And can you separate a Page (free, built on organic reach) from paid ads (a new, unproven channel) rather than assuming they’re the same investment.
What made the most sense for most businesses. Claiming a Page cost nothing but a little staff time and was worth doing almost regardless of audience fit, if only to secure the business’s name before someone else did. Advertising budget was a separate decision, better suited to businesses with a young, social audience and the patience to test small before committing real money, given how unproven the targeting and measurement tools still were.
What to watch going forward. Facebook’s Platform, opened to outside developers in May 2007, was already producing a wave of third-party apps and games, some of which were building audiences of their own inside Facebook. Businesses that got comfortable with the basics of a Page in 2008 were better positioned to make sense of whatever came out of that ecosystem next, rather than trying to catch up from zero later.
The honest takeaway for 2008: Facebook marketing was worth a business’s attention, but not yet worth betting the whole marketing budget on. Claim the ground, learn the platform and scale spending only once the tools and the audience fit had proven themselves.
Keep exploring: browse more Marketing Strategy guides, see everything we published in 2008 or check out the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
