Since its inception nearly seven years ago, Facebook has culled a following of, unofficially, more than 700 million users around the world. The largest social networking website has infiltrated pop culture with citations in sitcoms and even its own feature-length film. “Like us on Facebook” has almost become common vernacular for local and enterprise brands alike. This first chapter will take you through a high-level look at Facebook, from its unassuming creation in a Harvard dorm room to fundamental dos and don’ts for social marketers.
Facebook’s Reach
Understanding the Social Graph
Why Privacy Advocates Hate and Marketers Love Facebook
Facebook Ads Terms of Service
The Ethical Facebook Marketer’s Rules of Engagement
Facebook’s rapid rise, utter dominance, user-base girth, global reach, and raw marketing power are staggering—a total contextual marketing paradigm-buster. According to Facebook’s published statistics as of this writing, more than half of Facebook’s officially revealed 500 million users log in every day, engaging for an aggregate 700 billion minutes per month. That’s right, 700 billion. With a b.
According to Experian Hitwise, “Facebook” was the top search term in 2010 for the second straight year. Measured by Google’s own tool, Insights for Search, search interest for Facebook is fanatical, obliterating search buzz for Google around the world. The graph in Figure 1-1 represents the search interest in Google, Facebook, Twitter, and President Obama as indicated by Insights for Search.
The social networking site has amassed over 900 million pages, groups, events, and community pages. Users generate upwards of 30 billion monthly web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, and other shared content blocks. Because approximately 70 percent of users hail from outside the United States, a virtual army of 300,000 volunteers translates content using the Translations app.
Two hundred fifty million on-the-go mobile users currently access Facebook through their cell phones, iPads, and other devices. More than a million entrepreneurs and developers from 190 countries have created more than half a billion applications. Since social plugins launched in April, 2010, an average of 10,000 new websites integrate with Facebook every day. More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook, including over 80 of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and over half of comScore’s Global Top 100.
Facebook’s rise to power was as frighteningly fast and, in a way, as prodigal as its eccentric, youthful brain trust. The social network was founded by a group of four now-infamous Harvard students led by Mark Zuckerberg, a computer science student and brilliant hacker with a gift for black hat website scraping and deep intuition about human social motivations. Zuckerberg and cofounders Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin launched Facebook (known then as “The Facebook”) in February 2004 from their Harvard dorm room. By March that year, the site, which had formerly been an exclusive Harvard-only online network, expanded to include students from Columbia, Stanford, and Yale. In June, the Facebook crew migrated to Palo Alto, California, where Facebook Groups and the distinguishing Wall were added as staple profile features. The upstart social network celebrated reaching the one-million active-user mark in December—incredibly, less than one year after launch. It was clear that the Facebook revolution was now seriously underway.
In May 2005, the relocated Bay Area startup raised $12.7 million in venture capital from Accel Partners, and by August grew to envelop more than 800 colleges and universities. Students fell in love with Facebook’s heady mix of community, dating, college play, and friendships. For a guy with a serious nerd rap, Zuckerberg was proving himself a freakishly genius wizard of the new online virtual pheromones crucible.
In September, things really started to heat up when Facebook began allowing high school students around the country to create accounts. The Photos core application was deployed in October, at which point the site also began the assimilation of international school networks. By December 2005, the user base had expanded by an astonishing 500 percent to comprise more than 5.5 million active users. It was clear that Zuckerberg had his finger on the beating pulse of emergent Internet social media. Though far from mainstream, Facebook raised plenty of eyebrows, chiefly from marketers wondering where this was going to lead. By then, clever marketers were finding ways to gain access to college accounts to test word-of-mouth marketing, among other things. Facebook was especially fertile at this time because college kids had no idea whatsoever that marketers were in the mix.
In 2006, another year of astronomical growth, Facebook opened the once ivy-clad walled garden even more, providing free registration to anyone who wanted to join. No longer strictly for students, the future king of social networks was poised to explode into international mind share. The $27.5 million from Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners helped keep things scaling. More features were launched, including the Notes app, the now ubiquitous News Feed, Mini-Feed, the Development Platform, additional privacy controls, and Share functionality. Facebook and Microsoft entered into a strategic alliance to serve syndicated banner ads. By December, the user base had expanded internationally to 12 million people. The volume and diversity of the user base had marketers salivating. Many of us wondered what the FB crew had up their sleeves to make community members accessible to advertisers.
By April 2007, there were 20 million active users, connecting more than 2 million Canadian and 1 million active UK users of all ages and stripes to the main Facebook community. Yet to come that year were developments of seismic proportions that would ultimately rock the known Internet universe straight to the end of the millennium’s first decade. Facebook was poised to move past “website” status all the way to becoming an “operating system,” and ultimately set the stage for Facebook Ads.
On May 24, 2007, the new Facebook Platform was unveiled during the f8 Event in San Francisco. An official press release read, “Facebook, the Internet’s leading social utility, today announced that more than 65 developer partners have built applications on Facebook Platform, a new development platform that enables companies and engineers to integrate with the Facebook website and gain access to millions of users.” The ability of third-party developers to create social applications brought a level of wit to Facebook, instrumental to hooking users. Though marketers were still wondering what was in Facebook for them, the platform approach was a huge factor in attracting users who make up the Facebook Ads targeting pool today.
In short order, Microsoft took a $240 million equity stake in Facebook and cut an international advertising partnership deal. Marketers wondered what that meant. Would there be a do-it-yourself (DIY) ad platform or would media buys on Facebook be forever restricted to buying banners from Microsoft? Google’s Content Network allowed us some access to certain pages in Facebook, but marketers wanted more. We wondered what was coming next. Facebook then launched its fledgling mobile platform and the community mushroomed in size to an impressive 50 million active users. Marketers thought, “All these users are good. When are we going to get some real access?”
Then, the marketing tsunami hit with a vengeance when, in November, Facebook Ads was born. To a relatively small sect of attentive online marketers, this was a mind-bending development—Facebook’s speedily expanding user base was now straightforwardly accessible to any advertiser in a sleek DIY interface. It was incredible—instead of marketing to searches for the keyword “audio recording college Minnesota,” marketers were able to target high school guys who were interested in playing guitar, were single, or maybe played in a band. The rest, as they say, is history. The gold standard of online contextual marketing was born.
It was important for early adopting Facebook Ads marketers to understand the evolving demographics. Failure to do so meant that many search marketers had early failures. At the time, Facebook was still somewhat skewed toward college students, naturally, as they were there from the beginning. Speaking at Search Engine Strategies New York 2008, I preached to a crowd that barely cared about the “impending social PPC revolution.” aimClear, previously adept at segmenting landing pages based on inbound search queries, started creating landing page variations marketing to inbound gender, age, interests, relationship status, and other highly personal attributes.
Facebook took a radically mainstream turn in January 2008, cosponsoring the presidential debates in partnership with ABC News. On the heels of launching in Spanish, French, and German, friend list privacy controls were put in place along with a 21-language translation application. Chat was released and the next milestone was reached: Facebook blew across the 100-million-user mark without looking back.
As of Christmas Eve 2009, Facebook garnered 7.56 percent of the United States Internet traffic market share versus Google’s 7.56 percent.
Several key developments in 2009 wove Facebook into the fabric of human media and culture. First, CNN Live integrated Facebook into its online product, and at the same time, there was a significant promotional push on live cable newscasts. The Like element was added, and after Digital Sky Technologies invested $200 million for preferred stock, Facebook was then valued at an impressive $10 billion. Facebook Usernames launched, which directly (and perhaps deliberately) messed with Google, Yahoo!, and Bing; usernames meant that pages and individual profiles had a greater propensity to index in organic search engine results for keywords and names in the Facebook titles. The feature also permitted “vanity” URLs, such as Facebook.com/mashable or Facebook.com/boyz. After the acquisition of FriendFeed, Facebook boasted a cool 350 million users.
In 2010, we witnessed the launch of two internal applications: Questions and Places. Things are still growing at an incredible pace; Facebook is the most visited website in the United States, blowing the nearest social media contender, YouTube, out of the water by more than a 3:1 ratio and with more than 3 percent greater traffic share than the second contender, Google.
Hitwise generates reports on a variety of traffic metrics.
This much is clear: In the six and a half years since its inception, Facebook has grown from the playfully mischievous activities of a data-scraping dorm-room IT prankster to become the global social media gold standard. Mark Zuckerberg is both revered and reviled and, according to his July 2010 profile in Forbes magazine, has a net worth of about $6.9 billion—not bad for a 26-year-old hacker from White Plains, New York. Facebook itself is reportedly valued at around $70 billion, of which “Zuck” reportedly owns 24 percent. His hard-driven vision for social product, design, service, core technology development, human nature, and open-source infrastructure has proven both prescient and remarkable.
Understanding the Social Graph
The concept of tracking an individual’s defining characteristics is nothing new. French sociologist David Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) wrote of a “mechanical solidarity,” which wins out when personality differences are bridged, and “organic solidarity,” which occurs when differentiated individuals cooperate, taking autonomous roles.
In their 1921 book, Personality Traits: Their Classification and Measurement, Floyd Henry Allport and Gordon Willard Allport methodically rendered their hand-sketched “social graphs” to undertake colorful analysis on 11 nodes of human behavior, shown in Figure 1-5.
Mark Zuckerberg is widely credited with applying this concept, in name, to online social media. The designation seems appropriate. Certainly, in today’s data-driven world, people can be reduced, at least to a great extent, to a grid of personal affinities.
These days, the term social graph refers to Facebook’s matrix of interests and personal proclivities that make each person unique in their meanderings. Every Facebook user’s inimitable footprint is “graphed” and subsequently stored in the site’s clustered database. These captured personality traits make up the targeting grid—the “inventory” Facebook sells to advertisers.
Facebook tracks both known and unrevealed variables of users’ participation, to form its social graph. Like Google’s storied organic search results ranking algorithm, there are any number of “black box” graph variables marketers can only guess at. This tuned combination of data points on the social graph is the secret sauce behind Facebook Ads. In all likelihood, the algorithmic lattice evolves often in subtle ways without announcement or fanfare from Facebook corporate.
Note: Social graph refers to an identifying grid of interests and personal proclivities that make individuals unique.
The easiest social graph data points to understand are those in the Facebook ads targeting UI. The base targeting attributes, essentially data points on the social graph, are revolutionary in terms of advertisers’ ability to target users for advertisements. Gender, geographic location, age, sexual preference, relationship status, workplace, and education attributes are very powerful in combination. As an example of targeting depth, Study the social graph attributes for 24- to 55-year-old married male Criminal Justice and Criminology college graduates, who work at various police departments around the United States.
Facebook Ads targeting includes an attribute called, “Precise Interests,” which is only sparsely documented, considering its pervasive depth. The inline help in the ad creation tool offers only a limited explanation of what “Precise Interest” targeting entails.
You have to dig a bit through the FB help pages to really get a feel for what areas of users’ profiles are culled to comprise the Precise Interests and available to target on the social graph. Here’s how Facebook explains Precise Interests to advertisers in the “Likes & Interests Targeting” section of Facebook Ads Help. (The bold text is mine for emphasis.) “Likes & Interests targeting allows you to refine your ad’s target audience based on the content they’ve included in their profiles, as well as the Pages, Groups and other onsite content they’ve chosen to connect with. This includes sections like Interests, Activities, Favorite Music, Movies and TV Shows.” Great, cool! This gives us a better idea of what aspects of a person’s persona we can access via the Precise Interests.
Let’s poke around a bit more. In the, “Why do I see the particular ads I see on Facebook?” help offered users curious about the ads they’re seeing, here’s how FB explains ad targeting: “Facebook ads may be targeted by your location, sex, age, relationship status, professional or educational history, or to interests you’ve listed in your profile and the Pages and groups you’re connected to… (OK, we know all that, but here’s the big black-box-kicker) …Including more content on your profile that relates to your interests may improve the relevance or focus of the Facebook Ads you’re seeing. “More content that relates to interests?” “May improve relevance?” What does that mean? Basically FB is telling users that any aspect of their day-to-day meanderings, information in profiles, or whatever, might be included in the big black box. What does this mean to marketers? Chapters 5 and 6 are all about intensive social graph targeting. For now just keep in mind that FB does not tell us everything having to do with users that might impact targeting, and there are amazing user insights to be mined and exploited.
The genius of Facebook is that core features mirror types of social activities humans commonly share among themselves. The word viral is often applied to the phenomenon of social media. Facebook is the epitome of online virility in that the applications facilitate and amplify compelling behaviors in which humans partake in physical life. People love to send pictures to their families, reach out to make new friends, contribute to important daily discussions, explore mutual interests, and share content that matters to individuals and social groups. We listen to music, pursue professions, watch television, and read books. The social graph keeps track, silently noting our personal predilections as we express them and serving up pieces of us to the highest bidders.
Think about it: in those seemingly forever-ago pre-Internet days, sharing pictures with your mom meant getting extra prints, stuffing them in an envelope, which you’d need to address, stamp, mail, and wait for her to receive. Making friends meant going to physical events and seeing someone across the room, followed by first overtures and getting to know each other. Facebook provides awesome tools to make these, and many other universal activities and indulgences, much simpler. (The fact that it’s socially acceptable for users to dabble in voyeurism and various levels of anonymity seems to make the experience all the more alluring.) Facebook pushes human buttons surrounding connection, relationships, news, events, group congregation, etc. to appeal to deeply primal aspects of being a person, making it easier to connect than in the physical world. No wonder it’s such a powerful marketing medium. People love Facebook because of how it streamlines so much of what is important to social humans.
The “price” Facebook charges users in exchange for “free” use of these millennial tools comes with the revealing data yielded by our behavior. Users blindly give up their data for free. There are no privacy settings to shut off Facebook’s internal data mining for Facebook ads. Facebook’s social graph, the heart of Facebook demographic targeting, is perhaps the greatest development in marketing since search.
