Did you know that as of this month (April 2009) there are over 200 million active users on Facebook? That's double the number of users the company had just eight months ago. That's impressive considering that Mark Zuckerberg and three of his buddies launched the application from their Harvard dorm room in February 2004. Within a year there were a million users and it took off even more rapidly from there.
After reading Facebook Marketing: Leverage Social Media to Grow Your Business, I decided to create a page for NextMark.
Although this network is more appropriate for consumer marketing than business-to-business, it is still a good place to be. Most of our blog traffic comes from LinkedIn and other networks, but the Facebook page is a great way of keeping others informed about what is going on here at NextMark. We have some nice pictures of our data center posted on our company page, an active poll about Barack Obama's use of Twitter, live updates from our blog, cutting edge videos from our YouTube channel, and more. Direct marketers are facing some real challenges right now, but many of those who have embraced social network services appear to be more optimistic. Only time will tell how well these outlets deliver in terms of paid advertising ROI but the effort to create a page on Facebook is minimal and time well spent for your business.
About 4 million users become fans of Facebook pages each day. We'd love to have you as a NextMark fan. You are also invited to join the NextMark groups on Facebook or Linkedin and keep up on what's happening with next generation marketing. We hope to see you there!