So who cares about Mark Zuckerberg being named Person of the Year except his parents/family/friends and/or employees? You should! And not just for the curiosity/wonder factor of a 26 year old nerd worth over 6 billion dollars. (Why don’t I have Facebook style ideas AND act on them?) Facebook has over 550 million members, is adding 700,000 new members every day and last month accounted for one in four of all the “page views” in America.
All well and good for your next trivia show-down. But what does all this have to do with the average carpet cleaner? Potentially, quite a bit in the average dog-eat-dog world of local carpet cleaning marketing. Here is how the TIME magazine article summed it up:
“Google can serve ads to you on the basis of educated guesses about who you are and what you’re interested in, which are based in turn on your search history. Facebook doesn’t have to guess. It knows exactly who you are and what you’re interested in, because you told it. So if Nike wants its ads shown only to people ages 19 to 26 who live in Arizona and like Nickelback, Facebook can make that happen. In the world of targeted advertising, Facebook has a high-powered sniper rifle.
It also has social. Facebook users have the option, should they choose to exercise it, to “like” certain advertisements. When you anoint an ad in this fashion, it moves out of its assigned place at the edge of the page and into your News Feed and therefore into the News Feeds of your friends. Suddenly the advertisement has a social context. It is presented to your friends, by you, carrying your personal endorsement. For marketers, this is a holy grail. “What marketers have always been looking for is trying to get you to sell things to your friends,” Sandberg says. “And that’s what you do on Facebook.”
This “social” aspect of sharing “likes” is exactly what Strategies for Success has been preaching to our members for the last fourteen years. Those members who bought into the Cheerleader concept with a vengeance and more importantly have gotten their employees on board have become wildly successful. Now Facebook lets you do “Cheerleader building” on steroids!
Steve
PS Of course, all the hits you are going to receive from your new incredibly targeted Facebook ads won’t mean a thing unless your web site “converts” casual surfers into booked jobs, and yes, we have you covered on this with a great post on The Top Five Things Your Website Should Include!