Facebook hits its 300M ( Some thoughts at the Ad Week Wrap-up party)

ado — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 02:57:00 +0000

Last week Facebook announced its 300M unique user! Incredible. I also heard that there is now over 65M users that are accessing Facebook daily from mobile devices. I remember the days at Nokia where we discussed a service that had a mobile audience of >100M, but today I believe with over 65M active users a day on mobile, this has got to be getting pretty close to the the top. I am sure there is a service in China that is getting more then 65M active users a day, but for something so sticky and mobile, I think we will probably see Facebook to be the first to “break the 100M mark on mobile”

So where does this leave them with a business model? Also there was some unique discussions of Facebook killing on advertising.

Last week when I was at Advertising Week, Facebook sponsored a wrap-up party that I had the honor to attend ( Thanks Matt/Lance) .

I was amazed to meet the large Facebook media sales team over drinks at the Tribeca Cinema’s…… NY Facebook is growing quite fast with close to 20 people selling media. The head of Canada told me in Canada alone they had a media sales meeting with all the top media companies in Canada, and most of the CEO’s told them that at most they can rarely hit several millions of uniques a day ….. With Facebook at any one time in one day she said a brand can reach 6 million uniques…

The Internet has been very fragmented and to get such accurate targeting of 6 Million uniques in a campaign validates that

media buying can only grow through the ability to really push messages to the masses. I did not get in to further details on the state of the US, but with all of the targeting parameters and the ability to pay-for-performance on a click has proven to be also a very valuable model.

We will start to see more and more brand advertisers migrating to Facebook.

According to Wolfram, there are 8B page views a day from Search ” Pull based intent ( Demanding links) ” and with Social Media we are seeing 6B page views a day from ” Push based intent ( sharing links)”

It is interesting to see that these are just about equal.…. kind of a balance of Yin-Yang, Push- Pull today, but most of the content behind the links on Social media are to UGC ( twitpics, Flickr, etc..) and not branded content ( ESPN, KenRadio,etc…). So for most Digital Marketing Campaigns a big driver to a site has been proven to be based on Searching on Google /Bing/Yahoo, but as more links start to evolve with Branded content, I am sure we will see a nice balance of the lead-gen to sites from both search and social media.

So it is clear to me that Search and Social are keys to a digital marketing strategy in harmony and it only validates the dramatic ad revenue growth of Facebook. Interested to see what Twitter does with links and lead-gen. Will Social media someday match Search Revenues? As long as the Brands can be satisfied with the proper placement of brands in the mix, as Search has become a direct marketing tool, Social media can become a brand marketing tool….. See the book by Alan Moore and Tomi Ahonen ( Communities Dominate Brands- written many years ago and quite visionary…)

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Facebook hits its 300M ( Some thoughts at the Ad Week Wrap-up party)