subject: The Marketing Power of Facebook [print this page] If you've spent any time in the internet marketing business, you know that there are essentially two main sources of website traffic. There's free traffic, people who find your website by searching for it on search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, and there's paid traffic.
Search engine traffic is great because it's very targeted. People find your site because they're looking for it, which means they want it, and that makes them very promising potential customers. In other words, they're targeted.
When it comes to paid advertising, targeting is extremely important. It's a complete waste of time to advertise to people who are entirely disinterested in your product. I'll give you an extreme example. It's not very effective to advertise for life insurance policies on a television channel that shows primarily kid's cartoons. The audience (the kids) are going to be confused, and will not pick up the phone and give you a call. If you were to advertise a children's action figure, though, you'll probably have a little more luck. This brings me to why Facebook has such immense potential for effective marketing.
People put tons and tons of personal information on their public profiles, and you can use it all to target your advertising. People enter their location, their age, their sex, their relationship status, their likes and dislikes, it's amazing. Imagine you're promoting a Beatles cover band concert. You could target your advertising to people in the area, and who have marked the Beatles as one of their favorite artists. You can't do that with any other marketing platform.
This is the power of Facebook marketing, and it's only growing. 250 million people visit Facebook every day.
