Why Facebook Marketing Paid Off at 100 Million Users
The ROI case for Facebook in the second half of 2008, as the platform crossed 100 million users and its ad and Page tools started producing real numbers.
Facebook crossed 100 million active users in August 2008, up from roughly 20 million a year earlier, and by this point businesses running Pages and ads had enough data to talk about actual returns rather than just potential reach. The question worth answering isn’t whether Facebook has an audience. It clearly does. It’s whether that audience translates into revenue a business can point to.
The free reach is the real story. A Facebook Page, unlike almost any other channel available to a business in 2008, let a company post an update that showed up in the news feed of every fan who’d opted in, at no cost per post. Compare that to a newspaper ad or a radio spot, where every single impression costs money regardless of how many times you’ve run something similar before. A business with a thousand engaged fans on its Page had, in effect, a free distribution list that grew larger every time someone new clicked “like.”
Advertising costs were still comparatively cheap. Facebook’s ad platform, launched alongside Pages in November 2007, was young and its targeting options were basic by later standards, but that also meant demand from advertisers, and therefore prices, hadn’t caught up to the size of the audience. Businesses willing to experiment in 2008 were often getting attention at a lower cost than more mature channels like search advertising, simply because fewer competitors had figured out how to use it well yet.
The Beacon episode taught a real lesson about trust. Facebook’s late-2007 stumble with Beacon, publishing users’ purchases into their friends’ feeds without clear consent, and the swift backlash that forced Facebook to make it opt-in, showed that this audience cared about how it was marketed to. Businesses that respected that boundary, being transparent, not overposting, not trying to exploit the platform’s mechanics, built more durable goodwill than those chasing short-term tricks.
It reached people other channels missed. A meaningful share of Facebook’s user base in 2008 was made up of people who weren’t heavy readers of print advertising and weren’t necessarily searching for a business’s products by name yet. For a business selling to a younger or more digitally engaged customer, Facebook was reaching an audience that other budget lines simply weren’t touching at all.
The numbers were becoming trackable. Unlike a lot of earlier social platforms, Facebook Pages gave administrators basic data on fan growth and post engagement, and the ad platform reported clicks and spend directly. That let a business calculate a rough cost per engaged fan or cost per click, rather than relying on guesswork the way most earlier social experiments had required.
Why this mattered for the bottom line specifically. A fan base built on Facebook wasn’t a one-time expense the way a print campaign was. Once a business had an engaged group of fans, reaching them again for a new product, a sale or an announcement cost nothing beyond the time to write the post. That compounding value, larger reach the longer a business stuck with it, is the actual argument for treating Facebook marketing as an investment rather than a one-off experiment.
Businesses still treating Facebook as an afterthought in the fall of 2008 were leaving an inexpensive channel on the table, at a moment when it was cheaper to build an audience there than it was likely to be once more competitors caught on.
Keep exploring: browse more Marketing Strategy guides, see everything we published in 2008 or check out the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
