10. The Real Rules of FB
Never forget, Rule #1. Facebook is different. Really different from anything else on the Web. Everything on Facebook is a private conversation on a public platform. Everything else on the internet is intended to be public. If you remember the old days of “party line” telephones or if you have seen the same in old movies, Facebook is that on steroids and amphetamines.
1. Always consider every action you take on Facebook to be an interruption to a private conversation.
2. Always ask and receive permission before taking any action that may be considered aggressive by other users.
3. If your business culture has its ancestral roots in the old knock on the door, cold-calling, salesman, for you WebBusiness in general and Facebook in particular will be genetic culture shock between the old world and the new. All I can say is “Adjust and Adapt”.
a. Don’t be deceived by or infatuated with FB’s gross numbers.
i. Re-read part 8bi1 (email) and substitute Facebook for email. Except that the numbers are probably more like 2%,10%,15%, 40%, 33% (high to low frequency of usage). Only FB knows and they aren’t telling everything) What FB does tell is postured to attract advertisers which are their primary source of income. The key word in the FB pressroom is average. A basic understanding of statistics, in general, and the distribution around the average, specifically would be interesting to see. Most of the time, averages do not mean squat!
ii. According to Neilson, average usage of Facebook is 5 hrs a month in 2009. That’s 10 minutes a day, or 30 minutes every three days, on average.
iii. Then there is a phenomenon affecting these numbers. Based on observation, (again only Facebook knows for sure and they are not telling) Facebook usage appears to be highest at startup, significantly less after 30 days, continuing to diminish slowly at 60 days and stable after 90 days. The new wears off and most people have reconnected with all their old friends and new friends are less frequent. This is probably more true of older users than of younger users.
iv. Then there is another phenomenon. Let’s call it the “in-and-out-thing”. First, another fundamental of today’s electronic communication culture needs to be articulated. “Multitasking” is what the kids call it. That’s when they are doing their homework on the computer, with an IPOD in their ears, and email, instant messaging and Facebook up and running in the background, on the computer. They dance “in and out” of homework, email, instant messaging and Facebook, as they receive messages or comments from their friends. The kids are not the only ones, most business people who work at desks do the same thing, without the IPOD.
v. Then there is another phenomenon. The games, such as Farmville, which have recently become immensely popular on Facebook. “Chatting must also be considered here. I think that this time must be discounted or subtracted from usage. As you are advertising something for your business, what you should be most interested in is the time users spend reading one’s wall. Reading is absolutely the wrong word. I should have said “glancing at one’s wall” (30sec or less) and deciding if anything warrants a response.
vi. One more consideration. Any numbers from Facebook are mostly likely generated from their servers and IT people, not their market research people. As such, they are inflated because just because a user is connected to the FB server does not mean they are using FB.
1. They could be three tabs over on their browser doing something else for an hour or two, totally ignoring FB even though they are connected to the FB servers.
2. There are currently 700,000+ business Fan pages already on Facebook, but they are inseparately attached to an individual account. There are no separate accounts for businesses, just separate pages. You have to log in as an individual to access your Fan page. Even if you close the tab on your browser bar for your individual page or if you bypassed your individual page when you logged on, the FB servers still count the individual as connected and that would be included in the 5 hr average.
vii. The final observation. Among people who spend large amounts of time in front of a computer, the norm may well be that email is in the background and Facebook is off. But most activities on Facebook will generate an email, if the settings allow it, so that it fact Facebook is running, you are just not logged on Facebook’s servers. Google’s Gmail has a beta feature that allows a reply to a Facebook generated email that follows the blind Facebook address back thru Facebook and to the person who generated the email, so the two parties can exchange emails through Facebook without being on Facebook.
viii. What this means is really simple. Rarely do you have people’s undivided attention even when you think you do.
ix. You probably never know when they are looking at you.
x. And how you do WebBusiness probably needs to be adjusted to reflect a solid understanding of the reality of the environment in which you are really attempting to work.
b. Get some real numbers to work with.
i. Here’s a start. Comparing and breaking down the numbers published by Facebook and the numbers published by others unrelated to Facebook, such as A.C. Nielson, we can calculate the following percentages of the United States population on and using Facebook as of 1/2010:
Age Low Estimate High Estimate Average
13-17 20% 50% 42%
18-25 39% 98% 69%
26-35 26% 67% 47%
35-45 18% 46% 32%
45-54 11% 28% 20%
55+ 4% 10% 7%
ii. Take the numbers from your actual market area and your customers and calculate for yourself, the potential of your Facebook audience.
1. An example, my friend owns a music store in a medium size market (400,000 people extended).
2. Ninety percent of his customers are 25-45 years old
3. Using the following:
Age Group Factor
13-17 0.20
18-25 0.39
26-35 0.26
35-45 0.18
45-54 0.11
55+ 0.04
We can calculate his potential gross FB audience:
(.26 + .18) * 400,000 = 176,000
4. Taking our market analysis a step further using the distribution in 9fi above and some assumptive adjustments to the 5 hr/mo avg. Our analysis basically indicates that 25% of FB users are consuming 75% of FB server time. The window is our best guess at the realistic opportunities (avg. opening 20-30 seconds) you have to make an impression each day.
Usage Factor FB users Daily Windows
Constant .02 3,520 10
Multiple times/day .1 17,600 3
Once a day .15 26,400 1
Several times/week .4 70,400 1 every 2-3 days
Other .33 58,080 1 a week or less
I would adjust these numbers forward the younger your market is and backward the older your market is. Note we are still talking about gross users. We have not asked the most important questions yet.
5. The next question is ow many of these users do you really think might be interested in what you have to offer. Adjust these numbers downward by a significant factor based on what you know about your local market and your customers.
For example: maybe 20% of any community is Baptist or interested in anything Baptist; maybe 10% of any community plays a musical instrument or is interested in anything that is related to musical instruments, maybe 0.1% of any community is interested in playing guitar in a contemporary worship service in a Baptist church.
Let’s recalculate the table:
“Interested” FB users Windows/day
35 10
176 3
264 1
704 2-3wk
580 1 wk
Total “interested users” in this market = 1759
Total potential windows/day = 1762.
6. Now, let’s make another calculation. What is the cost of doing business on Facebook? The basic Facebook fanpage is free. If you wants fancy bells and whistle, and links, they can be expensive if you pay someone to set them up for you (minimum $1,500-$2,500). There is the cost of content development, specifically pictures, artwork and copywriting. There is the labor or personnel cost of monitoring and managing your Facebook presence.
Needless to say, every businesses is different, and each one needs to know what its costs are.
For illustration, let’s just say that it costs $300 to set up and $100 a week to maintain the Facebook presence.
Back to the “windows”. How many times are we going to use the windows? Too many times and your Facebook audience will claim that you are “bombing” them and shut us down instantly. Not enough, and they won’t remember us. Again, every business is different and this is something that will need to be finetuned on the “street” level. If you’re a restaurant, your fans probably would not object to learning of your “lunch special” every day. If you are a wholesaler of widgets, once a month for three days might be all that’s needed.
For illustration, lets say that we want to use our Facebook windows on a basic Fanpage once a week.
Then the typical cost of using a window equals $0.10 to $0.30 per window depending on how fast we charge off our development costs.
We need to take our calculations one step further. Not everybody is going to stop what they’re doing and respond to our initiative. Realistically, we should expect be in the range of 1% to 5%. Then means that it costs $2.00 to $10.00 to create each response.
Note further that a “response” may or may be a “sale”. Maybe it is just getting someone to visit our business for the first time, in which case additional selling expenses will be incurred. But at least we are on the right track: we are face to face on our home court.
Judgment is withheld as to whether or not these are “good” numbers. Each business needs its own calculations and it own judgment. $2.00 to $10.00 may be too high if it is more than 10% of the price of the items we are selling. On the other hand, that cost is insignificant is the minimum price of the items we are selling exceeds $1,000.
Our primary purpose here is to illustrate the proper way, in our opinion, to plan and execute any Facebook marketing program and to emphasize the obvious importance for marketing people to understand “costs of doing business.”
Now that you have some feel for your numbers, here is the hard part. They are out there waiting to hear from you but you cannot talk to them. Not yet. There is only one way to connect with these people.
1. How many of them are already your friends? How many are already your customers? How many are your friends and customers, friends?
2. You have to get someone else to connect for you. And first, this means that you are giving up some control over the process.
3. Facebook’s logic is simple.
a. Set up an individual Facebook account.
b. Then get some friends from somewhere, any friends.
c. Then set up a Fan Page for your business.
d. Ask, don’t tell, your friends to visit your Fan Page and click on the “Be A Fan” button.
e. Then ask your friends to tell their friends what they have done and to encourage them to do the same.
f. Since the carefully selected and massaged numbers are widely advertised, by Facebook and those whose livelihood is inextricably linked to Facebook, as being potentially exponential, the assumption is that in no time you will be rolling in friends and fans.
i. According to Facebook, the average FB user has 130 friends, some of whom are in your market and some are not.
ii. If 130 people tell 130 people who tell 130 people who tell 130 people who tell 130 people (5 iterations), then that is 2, 197,000 people who have been told and the other false expectation is that all this happened in three days.
iii. Guess what? There is a .1% of 1% chance of that happening. Especially if there is money involved and at some point, money had better be involved, right? We are still talking business here, aren’t we?
iv. Maybe we would better off if we figured on this:
You told 100 people, of whom 10 did what you asked and told 25 people, of whom 5 actually did what their friend asked, who told 25 people of whom 1 did what the friends’ friends asked. That 16 people now on your fan page, after 3 weeks. And no orders. You are still trying to organize this thing.
This is another example similar to what we discussed earlier about how the Web is horizontal not vertical; built wide, not deep.
And as my old statistics professor in college said, “there is a big difference between data and information.”
Clearly, Facebook flavors those WebBusinesses
whose markets are widely defined demographically, those who cater to under 35 age groups and whose infrastructure is not constrained geographically.
That is not to say that Facebook does not have anything to offer small local and regional businesses, because it does.
Nor does it mean that the relatively low penetration in older groups age 45 and up should be ignored. Older groups offer exciting potential for the right businesses on Facebook.
Older users, percentage wise and time wise, probably aren’t playing games or chatting.
Older groups have more friends and acquaintances in more diverse places than younger groups. This may be an especially important fundamental in building your community.
Short term, older groups will continue to see exponential growth in size.
Long term, the young groups will be older groups one day. There is a huge change in mindset, world view, buying habits and consumer choices between 30 yr olds and 40 yr olds probably more so than in any other decade of one’s adult life.
iv. Rule #5—If you are going to do Marketing right, you have to do Marketing Math the right and preferably first.
Never forget, Rule #1. Facebook is different. Really different from anything else on the Web. Everything on Facebook is a private conversation on a public platform. Everything else on the internet is intended to be public. If you remember the old days of “party line” telephones or if you have seen the same in old movies, Facebook is that on steroids and amphetamines.
1. Always consider every action you take on Facebook to be an interruption to a private conversation.
2. Always ask and receive permission before taking any action that may be considered aggressive by other users.
3. If your business culture has its ancestral roots in the old knock on the door, cold-calling, salesman, for you WebBusiness in general and Facebook in particular will be genetic culture shock between the old world and the new. All I can say is “Adjust and Adapt”.
a. Don’t be deceived by or infatuated with FB’s gross numbers.
i. Re-read part 8bi1 (email) and substitute Facebook for email. Except that the numbers are probably more like 2%,10%,15%, 40%, 33% (high to low frequency of usage). Only FB knows and they aren’t telling everything) What FB does tell is postured to attract advertisers which are their primary source of income. The key word in the FB pressroom is average. A basic understanding of statistics, in general, and the distribution around the average, specifically would be interesting to see. Most of the time, averages do not mean squat!
ii. According to Neilson, average usage of Facebook is 5 hrs a month in 2009. That’s 10 minutes a day, or 30 minutes every three days, on average.
iii. Then there is a phenomenon affecting these numbers. Based on observation, (again only Facebook knows for sure and they are not telling) Facebook usage appears to be highest at startup, significantly less after 30 days, continuing to diminish slowly at 60 days and stable after 90 days. The new wears off and most people have reconnected with all their old friends and new friends are less frequent. This is probably more true of older users than of younger users.
iv. Then there is another phenomenon. Let’s call it the “in-and-out-thing”. First, another fundamental of today’s electronic communication culture needs to be articulated. “Multitasking” is what the kids call it. That’s when they are doing their homework on the computer, with an IPOD in their ears, and email, instant messaging and Facebook up and running in the background, on the computer. They dance “in and out” of homework, email, instant messaging and Facebook, as they receive messages or comments from their friends. The kids are not the only ones, most business people who work at desks do the same thing, without the IPOD.
v. Then there is another phenomenon. The games, such as Farmville, which have recently become immensely popular on Facebook. “Chatting must also be considered here. I think that this time must be discounted or subtracted from usage. As you are advertising something for your business, what you should be most interested in is the time users spend reading one’s wall. Reading is absolutely the wrong word. I should have said “glancing at one’s wall” (30sec or less) and deciding if anything warrants a response.
vi. One more consideration. Any numbers from Facebook are mostly likely generated from their servers and IT people, not their market research people. As such, they are inflated because just because a user is connected to the FB server does not mean they are using FB.
1. They could be three tabs over on their browser doing something else for an hour or two, totally ignoring FB even though they are connected to the FB servers.
2. There are currently 700,000+ business Fan pages already on Facebook, but they are inseparately attached to an individual account. There are no separate accounts for businesses, just separate pages. You have to log in as an individual to access your Fan page. Even if you close the tab on your browser bar for your individual page or if you bypassed your individual page when you logged on, the FB servers still count the individual as connected and that would be included in the 5 hr average.
vii. The final observation. Among people who spend large amounts of time in front of a computer, the norm may well be that email is in the background and Facebook is off. But most activities on Facebook will generate an email, if the settings allow it, so that it fact Facebook is running, you are just not logged on Facebook’s servers. Google’s Gmail has a beta feature that allows a reply to a Facebook generated email that follows the blind Facebook address back thru Facebook and to the person who generated the email, so the two parties can exchange emails through Facebook without being on Facebook.
viii. What this means is really simple. Rarely do you have people’s undivided attention even when you think you do.
ix. You probably never know when they are looking at you.
x. And how you do WebBusiness probably needs to be adjusted to reflect a solid understanding of the reality of the environment in which you are really attempting to work.
b. Get some real numbers to work with.
i. Here’s a start. Comparing and breaking down the numbers published by Facebook and the numbers published by others unrelated to Facebook, such as A.C. Nielson, we can calculate the following percentages of the United States population on and using Facebook as of 1/2010:
Age Low Estimate High Estimate Average
13-17 20% 50% 42%
18-25 39% 98% 69%
26-35 26% 67% 47%
35-45 18% 46% 32%
45-54 11% 28% 20%
55+ 4% 10% 7%
ii. Take the numbers from your actual market area and your customers and calculate for yourself, the potential of your Facebook audience.
1. An example, my friend owns a music store in a medium size market (400,000 people extended).
2. Ninety percent of his customers are 25-45 years old
3. Using the following:
Age Group Factor
13-17 0.20
18-25 0.39
26-35 0.26
35-45 0.18
45-54 0.11
55+ 0.04
We can calculate his potential gross FB audience:
(.26 + .18) * 400,000 = 176,000
4. Taking our market analysis a step further using the distribution in 9fi above and some assumptive adjustments to the 5 hr/mo avg. Our analysis basically indicates that 25% of FB users are consuming 75% of FB server time. The window is our best guess at the realistic opportunities (avg. opening 20-30 seconds) you have to make an impression each day.
Usage Factor FB users Daily Windows
Constant .02 3,520 10
Multiple times/day .1 17,600 3
Once a day .15 26,400 1
Several times/week .4 70,400 1 every 2-3 days
Other .33 58,080 1 a week or less
I would adjust these numbers forward the younger your market is and backward the older your market is. Note we are still talking about gross users. We have not asked the most important questions yet.
5. The next question is ow many of these users do you really think might be interested in what you have to offer. Adjust these numbers downward by a significant factor based on what you know about your local market and your customers.
For example: maybe 20% of any community is Baptist or interested in anything Baptist; maybe 10% of any community plays a musical instrument or is interested in anything that is related to musical instruments, maybe 0.1% of any community is interested in playing guitar in a contemporary worship service in a Baptist church.
Let’s recalculate the table:
“Interested” FB users Windows/day
35 10
176 3
264 1
704 2-3wk
580 1 wk
Total “interested users” in this market = 1759
Total potential windows/day = 1762.
6. Now, let’s make another calculation. What is the cost of doing business on Facebook? The basic Facebook fanpage is free. If you wants fancy bells and whistle, and links, they can be expensive if you pay someone to set them up for you (minimum $1,500-$2,500). There is the cost of content development, specifically pictures, artwork and copywriting. There is the labor or personnel cost of monitoring and managing your Facebook presence.
Needless to say, every businesses is different, and each one needs to know what its costs are.
For illustration, let’s just say that it costs $300 to set up and $100 a week to maintain the Facebook presence.
Back to the “windows”. How many times are we going to use the windows? Too many times and your Facebook audience will claim that you are “bombing” them and shut us down instantly. Not enough, and they won’t remember us. Again, every business is different and this is something that will need to be finetuned on the “street” level. If you’re a restaurant, your fans probably would not object to learning of your “lunch special” every day. If you are a wholesaler of widgets, once a month for three days might be all that’s needed.
For illustration, lets say that we want to use our Facebook windows on a basic Fanpage once a week.
Then the typical cost of using a window equals $0.10 to $0.30 per window depending on how fast we charge off our development costs.
We need to take our calculations one step further. Not everybody is going to stop what they’re doing and respond to our initiative. Realistically, we should expect be in the range of 1% to 5%. Then means that it costs $2.00 to $10.00 to create each response.
Note further that a “response” may or may be a “sale”. Maybe it is just getting someone to visit our business for the first time, in which case additional selling expenses will be incurred. But at least we are on the right track: we are face to face on our home court.
Judgment is withheld as to whether or not these are “good” numbers. Each business needs its own calculations and it own judgment. $2.00 to $10.00 may be too high if it is more than 10% of the price of the items we are selling. On the other hand, that cost is insignificant is the minimum price of the items we are selling exceeds $1,000.
Our primary purpose here is to illustrate the proper way, in our opinion, to plan and execute any Facebook marketing program and to emphasize the obvious importance for marketing people to understand “costs of doing business.”
Now that you have some feel for your numbers, here is the hard part. They are out there waiting to hear from you but you cannot talk to them. Not yet. There is only one way to connect with these people.
1. How many of them are already your friends? How many are already your customers? How many are your friends and customers, friends?
2. You have to get someone else to connect for you. And first, this means that you are giving up some control over the process.
3. Facebook’s logic is simple.
a. Set up an individual Facebook account.
b. Then get some friends from somewhere, any friends.
c. Then set up a Fan Page for your business.
d. Ask, don’t tell, your friends to visit your Fan Page and click on the “Be A Fan” button.
e. Then ask your friends to tell their friends what they have done and to encourage them to do the same.
f. Since the carefully selected and massaged numbers are widely advertised, by Facebook and those whose livelihood is inextricably linked to Facebook, as being potentially exponential, the assumption is that in no time you will be rolling in friends and fans.
i. According to Facebook, the average FB user has 130 friends, some of whom are in your market and some are not.
ii. If 130 people tell 130 people who tell 130 people who tell 130 people who tell 130 people (5 iterations), then that is 2, 197,000 people who have been told and the other false expectation is that all this happened in three days.
iii. Guess what? There is a .1% of 1% chance of that happening. Especially if there is money involved and at some point, money had better be involved, right? We are still talking business here, aren’t we?
iv. Maybe we would better off if we figured on this:
You told 100 people, of whom 10 did what you asked and told 25 people, of whom 5 actually did what their friend asked, who told 25 people of whom 1 did what the friends’ friends asked. That 16 people now on your fan page, after 3 weeks. And no orders. You are still trying to organize this thing.
This is another example similar to what we discussed earlier about how the Web is horizontal not vertical; built wide, not deep.
And as my old statistics professor in college said, “there is a big difference between data and information.”
Clearly, Facebook flavors those WebBusinesses
whose markets are widely defined demographically, those who cater to under 35 age groups and whose infrastructure is not constrained geographically.
That is not to say that Facebook does not have anything to offer small local and regional businesses, because it does.
Nor does it mean that the relatively low penetration in older groups age 45 and up should be ignored. Older groups offer exciting potential for the right businesses on Facebook.
Older users, percentage wise and time wise, probably aren’t playing games or chatting.
Older groups have more friends and acquaintances in more diverse places than younger groups. This may be an especially important fundamental in building your community.
Short term, older groups will continue to see exponential growth in size.
Long term, the young groups will be older groups one day. There is a huge change in mindset, world view, buying habits and consumer choices between 30 yr olds and 40 yr olds probably more so than in any other decade of one’s adult life.
iv. Rule #5—If you are going to do Marketing right, you have to do Marketing Math the right and preferably first.
Upcoming:
The Culture Clash between Business and Facebook
The Culture Clash between Business and Facebook
