Is something going on with Facebook?
Naw, I'm just kidding. I read the news reports: apparently, one can now own a piece of the third largest nation in the world, Facebookistan, for $38...no, wait: $40...no, wait: $42.50...no, wait: $47.33...well, you get the idea.
No matter, when you stop about and think about it you have to be in awe of an idea that can rise from the brains of nerds in a dorm room (albeit a Harvard dorm room) to the largest public stock offering in the history of tech stocks. Not bad for an idea concieved as a way to meet chicks online.
So, okay, clearly it's Facebook week along the InterWebs (and everywhere else) and Facebook DAY in the financial markets (NY Times and Reuters are both living blogging & video...actual FB trading to begin at 11 a.m. EDT).
The good news is this has everyone talking about social media. The bad news is most of the conversation centers around advertising, selling ads on social media platforms.
That's all well and good - gotta pay the bills somehow and advertising makes the commercial world go around - but the essence, the very core of social media remains conversation and community building.
But we can't seem to talk about social media this week without talking about advertising on social media so here's an interesting little diddy from Business Insider as reported by Wordstream: advertising reach on Facebook doesn't come close to advertising reach on...oh, well...let's say Google.
Sure, the former is a social platform and the later is the world's largest search engine...with a social platform (GooglePlus, if you haven't heard).
Here's the key points of the Business Insider/Wordstream piece:
?Total Reach: Facebook reaches 51 percent of all Internet users. Google: 90 percent. Click through rates (the number of people actually clicking on the ad): Facebook, 0.051 percent; Google, 0.4 percent; the average of all online ads: 0.1 percent.
Facebook produced $1.06 billion in ad revenue last year, down 6.5 percent. Google produced $2.9 billion, up one percent.
Facebook targets by education, workplace, "likes," location and demographics. Google targets by interest, keyworkds, remarketing and demographics.
Facebook uses typical display ads and sponsored stories. Google uses text ads, image ads, video with text overly and mobile web game ads.
Here's the bottom line: if you decide you want to advertise on social platforms, you really need to know your community (your online, social space community). And you can't really know your online social space community unless you have one. And you can't have one unless you use social media to build it.
