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Introduction to Facebook

On February 4th 2004, Mark Zuckerberg created and launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room. What began as a membership site only for students at Harvard University soon grew to accept students from other universities, and then college students, and finally anyone with an email address who was over the age of 13.

Today, Facebook has over 400 million active users worldwide, with the average user spending more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook. It was no surprise that many places of work and education started to ban the use of Facebook as most felt it was distracting their employees or students from their actual work. In fact, parents would prevent their children from going on sites like Facebook as they simply felt it was a waste of time and believed their children only went there to socialize with their friends.

However, with the launch of social sites such as YouTube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006, there was no doubt that these sites were changing the way users interacted online. Businesses began to realize in order to remain competitive and reach out to their customers, they must start engaging in the tools and networks where their audiences are spending a lot of their time. To date there are more than 1.5 million local businesses that have active pages on Facebook.

What would it mean to an organization if they had customers talking about their products and services to their friends? What would be the value of reaching out to customers to tell them about your new services or promotions? What would be the ROI on having your brand exposed and built on social sites like Facebook? These are the questions that businesses began to ask themselves – the challenge was exactly how can an organization start to monetize Facebook for business purposes.