The State of Facebook Marketing in 2009

Facebook opened this year with roughly 150 million users worldwide and has been adding tens of millions more every few months since; the company says it’s now well past that number and still climbing fast. For businesses, the more important story than the raw growth is that the tools to market on the platform have gone from experimental to usable over the past two years. Here’s where things stand.

Pages have become the default business presence

Since Facebook opened business Pages to everyone in late 2007, they’ve become the standard way a business shows up on the platform, distinct from a personal profile and built specifically for an audience that “likes” rather than “friends” you. A Page has no friend limit and is public-facing by design, which a personal profile isn’t meant to be. A growing number of local businesses in particular are treating their Page as a lightweight second website, cheaper to maintain and easier to update than the real thing.

Self-serve advertising has matured

Facebook’s ad platform, running since the Pages launch, lets any business set a budget and target ads by criteria like age, location and stated interests, a level of targeting most small businesses couldn’t get anywhere near through traditional local advertising. It’s still a young platform compared to Google’s search ads, and click-through rates on Facebook ads tend to run lower than search, but the targeting precision and low minimum spend have made it a real testing ground for businesses that could never have afforded a comparable audience through print or radio.

Insights finally gives Pages real data

Facebook has expanded the analytics available to Page owners this year, showing fan growth, post reach and engagement in a dashboard rather than leaving businesses to guess. That single change has shifted how businesses treat their Page, from posting whatever seems interesting to watching what their audience responds to and adjusting. It’s a smaller toolset than what’s available for a website through something like Google Analytics, but it’s the first time Page owners have had any real feedback loop at all.

The News Feed changes how content gets seen

A Page’s posts don’t reach every fan automatically; they compete for space in a fan’s News Feed against posts from friends and other Pages, which means a post that gets no engagement quickly stops being shown at all. Businesses that have figured this out are posting things people want to respond to, a question, a photo, something timely, rather than straight promotional copy, because engagement itself is what keeps a Page visible.

Where the gaps still are

Facebook marketing in 2009 still asks a lot of a business willing to experiment. There’s no reliable playbook yet for how often to post, what kind of content performs best across different types of businesses or how to value a “fan” against a customer acquired through search or email. What is clear is that the audience is now large enough and the tools mature enough that ignoring the platform is itself a decision, not a neutral choice.

Two years ago, a business Facebook Page barely existed as a concept. Now it’s a genuine channel with its own advertising system, its own analytics and an audience larger than most countries. The businesses figuring out how to use it well this year are the ones who’ll have a real head start once the rest of the market stops treating it as optional.