While social networking has grown out of all proportions, one site is by far and away the market leader. But why is Facebook so influential and should businesses and website designers take notice of it?
When you consider that Facebook is the most popular site used by a broad cross-section of people. That it consumes more web time than Google, Yahoo, Youtube, Microsoft, Wikipedia and Amazon combined and that the average US user spends 4 hours, 39 minutes per month logged onto it. With an audience like that you’d be mad not to take it seriously.
This is why more and more web designers are including Facebook homepages, ad links to the site and Facebook links from their own websites. As a site it primarily is a social network between friends but e-commerce and online business can tap into this vast resource if you use the right approach. What Facebook have cleverly done, is to take all the successful elements of web interaction and combined it within one site.
The site is FriendsReunited, Skype, Yahoo games and CBC News all in one. Users play, interact, keep in touch and occasionally browse, comment and purchase while facebooking. This is where they find referrals of goods and services they recommend to friends, colleagues and family and where company reputations can be made and lost.
People’s homepages are becoming more and more like the office notice board, cluttered with social events, favorite video clips and personal newsflashes. They are also full of recommendations for products and companies that the person enjoys and subscribes to. The art here is to use Facebook as a pool from which to attract new customers and engage with existing ones.
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