Facebook for “Friends”

Just for college kids? Not any More. Since June 2006, comScore Media Matrix has reported a 113 percent rise in Facebook visitors over the age of thirty-five. That makes up 41 percent of the sirs visitors. People around the world can connect with one another on Facebook and easily join groups of like-mided people they would not have met otherwise.

We are still in the early stages of figuring out what’s important for marketers to do on Facebook. It may succeed as a marketing platform in ways that MySpace has not. Unlike MySpace, Facebook decided to open up their network to developers. What that means is developers can create applica-What that means is developers can create applica-tions for Facebook users to employ. According to the September 2007 issue of Business 2.0, in the ten weeks since it was open to developers, there were 2,500 new applications created that triggered 139 million downloads. These applications run the gamut from ways to donate to charities to favorite movie picks.

At this point in time, I think Facebook has demonstrated that it can be useful as a networking tool for business owners, but still has to prove itself as a small business marketing tool, Given all the other tactics available, I wouldn’t rush into this one.

QUICK TIP

Five tips for selecting keywords:

1.          Don’t pick broad generic words that cost a lot and yield no tangible results. You’ll never come up on the first page of search results if you use the word “shopping” for example. There are 860 million citations ahead of you.

2.          Use niche phrases whenever possible. At the time of this writing, three- and four-word phrases work very well for targeted traffic.

3.          Stay current with word and phrase changes in your industry or niche and update your list.

4.          Use every tense of your words by adding the suffixes –ed, -s, and -ing.

5.          Make sure to use your keywords phrases on your website, in a sentence end-ing in a period. Just listing words on a page doesn’t work.