Maximize Your Social: A One-Stop Guide to Building a Social Media Strategy for Marketing and Business Success

Chapter 7

Maximizing Your Facebook Presence

If you look at all the social networks side by side, Facebook is the largest, with more than 1 billion users. It’s also the most playful and the place where everybody is hanging out. It’s kind of like the white pages; if you ever wanted to advertise to people, that’s where they’d be. And it’s not just an American phenomenon: the site features more than 20 million users in several countries globally. As noted earlier, 50 percent of the user base is older than 35 years of age, so Facebook is not just for younger people. It embraces people of all the demographic characteristics.

This huge potential of Facebook challenges every single company to leverage it for the viral aspect and capture friends of fans when your fans share your message to their network. A look at who our average friends are gives you an idea of the influence our fans can have.

A study by the Pew Research Center reports that the average number of friends a Facebook user has is 229. Some of us may have a lot less, and some may have a lot more. A point of interest from this report is that our Facebook friends are generally former high school or college classmates or family members,1 which is not necessarily the case on LinkedIn or any other social media platform. Therefore, the friends of our fans are some of the most trusted people in their network, and to whom do people turn when they want recommendations or feedback? They go to trusted friends or family. With that in mind, ...