Today is the time when social media is rapidly redefining the marketing landscape. Companies are eager to join the social media band wagon and are willing to spend money and time on social media marketing.
By doing social media marketing the right way, companies can successfully spur the web traffic to their website and establish themselves as a brand in their respective industries. Amongst the various sites that help in brand building, Facebook leads the league.
Facebook hit the 175,000,000 active user mark, just 5 weeks after it hit 150 million users in January. At this rate, Facebook has been growing by a whopping 600,000 users per day over the last several weeks,
Facebook has been instrumental in getting increased attention from fans, especially if the company is already a brand. Brands get more popularity from Facebook because:
1. Peoples already know about their products and services.
2. They are popular in their competition.
3. People regularly search for popular brand names.
Here’s a comparative study of Coca-Cola/Pepsi & Microsoft/Oracle to see how bigger brand get better results from Facebook:
Coca Cola(Facebook Fans Page)
Details
2008 Sales (mil.) $31,944.0
2008 Employees 92,400
Competition
PepsiCo
PepsiCo(Facebook Fans Page)
Details
2008 Sales (mil.) $13,796
Competition
Coca Cola
Pepsi is also popular but when they created a fans page on Facebook Coca Cola outnumbered them. The reason being people started showing more interest in Coca Cola as it is a bigger brand, thereby making it more popular!
Here’s another example that shows how more popular brands get better returns from Facebook.
Microsoft Vs. Oracle
Microsoft(Facebook Fans Page)
Details
2009 Sales (mil.) $58,437.0
2009 Employees 93,000
Competition
Oracle
Oracle
Details
2008 Sales (mil.) $22,430.0
2008 Employees 84,233
Competition
Microsoft
Here Microsoft & Oracle both are popular but when it comes to Facebook people started showing there interest in Microsoft & Microsoft became more popular then oracle on Facebook as well.
So Facebook helps companies to create there own brand but if you are already a brand then Facebook helps you to get attention from millions of fans.
August 28th, 2009 at 5:04 am
amazing details…There is no looking back for facebook…
August 28th, 2009 at 10:33 am
Great information. Thanks for sharing.
August 28th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
I feel that companies that use social networking sites such as facebook and twitter are more reputable.
August 28th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Already established brands are thriving because of Facebook. Facebook is an example of perfectly looking outside the box and benefitting the general population. Facebook = an evolution of marketeing. Old brands like listed above shouldn’t be able to expand like that.
They can now, thanks to Facebook! Here’s a few things THEY CAN’T DO THOUGH!
http://concretelyambiguous.com/category/i-bet-you-cant/
August 28th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
didn’t coke also have a head start over pepsi on launching their fan page? i think that would have a huge impact on overall size right now.
August 28th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
I think the Competition should be with linux and they have 136,927
fans and 0 sales
August 28th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
From your data there is no direct correlation between Brand and company size with FaceBook fans.
By your analysis Microsoft should have way more fans than both Pepsi and Coke but that is not the case at all. Also, your numbers in relationship to the fans would lead you to believe that Coke is 15 times larger and more popular than Pepsi but the revenue numbers don’t show that at all. Started out with a good idea to try to tie the (2) together but there just isn’t a clear connection from the evidence presented here.
August 28th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
Not that I particularly want to sound contrary, but I think there are two problems here with the post:
1) We don’t have any data for the length of time any of the brands have been on Facebook or how they got as many fans as they currently do (e.g. has Coca-Cola had a Facebook page for longer or shorter than Pepsi? How much longer? Have either of the companies used promotions outside of the natural Facebook process to promote their Pages?).
2) Just because a brand has a certain number of Facebook fans, large or small, doesn’t in and of itself create instant brand awareness or increase brand awareness or brand evangelism. It is how the brand’s handlers use social media that determines how well it does on that front. You can just build up to your target and then sit back. You have to engage your fans actively.
August 28th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
You are a very smart person!
September 1st, 2009 at 4:56 am
Excuseme, does anybody know how to use the api from facebook to extract the information from the brand groups? I mean not only the name of it and the members but the written text that is in it?
Also I need to use the api to search the stream for a certain keywords and get the response of the content of the posts made by users that had made an input with that keywords in a certain range of time, and along with the matching post I would like to get the response to it even dough it does not match the keyword I asked for.
Thank you very much!
September 3rd, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Great site…keep up the good work.
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:36 pm
It is very difficult to get fans from any old page. I agree and think you need a stong brand to attract fans.
September 19th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
yea nice Work
September 23rd, 2009 at 4:54 am
Cool stuff man! I’ll check it out again soon. Great internet insites.
October 3rd, 2009 at 8:58 am
I am really glad I found this blog. Great Job!
October 7th, 2009 at 3:30 am
I was going to write a similar blog concerning this topic, you beat me to it. You did a nice job!
October 9th, 2009 at 8:21 pm
I was lucky enough to find your website through google. I have been searching all day for this information, Thank You.
October 25th, 2009 at 2:52 am
You made some good points here.
November 29th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Great advice, i was thinking about you the other day. I need some time to think about this