I've not been a big fan of Facebook for marketing. Facebook is a difficult beast with low clickthroughs and far more potential than ROI for the majority of marketers, and so when I'm looking for a social media expert, Facebook is about having a profile, not necessarily driving results. Sure we've seen results, but they've tended to be as a traffic driver for traditional websites. Lots of folks spend time on Facebook, and thus its natural you have a presence there. Do some conversion pages - create some groups, and that's about it, unless you have the time and money for apps and contests.
Well, no more.
Based on my own traffic stats for blogs that range from politics to marketing to fashion to small business, I see Facebook becoming an ever-increasing important aspect of a social media marketing campaign.
This article on Hitwise's estimate of Perez Hilton's traffic was the first clue. Google typically will deliver 80% of your non Rss traffic if you optimize well, and the revelation that Facebook can outpush traffic is no small one. You may say that Perez is a gossip, and the only people who want to read gossip are heading there from Facebook, but that's exactly the point. Facebook is built to keep people in. When click traffic goes outside Facebook, it's highly targeted. Those wanting to read gossip go to Perez Hilton. Those wanting to say, get a job, or buy a product, or watch a video, or learn about a service are also going to self-selecting to be interested. And they'll be coming from referrals. Currently, if you have the viral chops, you can drive traffic using your update feeds and getting people interested in joining, writing, and posting content to your pages and groups and updates. If you have a big network, that can lead to a lot of traffic, but it's entirely based on your network (and their network). That's some hard slogging, and tends to only work haphazardly.
But now, there's the Facebook search beta, which is rumored to be like Twitter search. If it's executed properly, which is to say if it actually dredges up content, it could be a tremendous boost for traffic for those outside Facebook.
All of a sudden, those not in your network can find you. Furniture designers, car enthusiasts, political causes, and job seekers can now search by brand through updates, instead of profiles. That's huge. It's a microcosm of what Google and Twitter do, and with the sheer traffic of Facebook, it guarantees some very hot, targeted opportunities for marketers.
I don't see a lot of people getting involved in this. They're making a huge mistake. This is big. Much bigger than BING, which is sending me traffic, but not nearly as much as Facebook is. If I can almost double traffic to every site simply by improving my content to my network, imagine what you can do with a targeted marketing campaign.
It's big. Gird your loins, and figure out how to build community on Facebook. 6 months from now, the winners will be those with networks in place.
