Social Media: An Overview of Facebook

As we enter week two of our social media adventure, we put our focus on the ever popular Facebook and how we can harness its power for personal, business, and individual branding applications.

Facebook was founded in February of 2004 by former Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, who ran it as a hobby project with some financial help from Eduardo Saverin. Initially Facebook was a closed community, open only to college students from recognized institutions.

This closed membership model kept it relatively small, until 2006 when it expanded further to include high school students, and finally in December of 2008, became available to the general public. The website currently has more than 400 million active users worldwide.

Here are some startling statistics from their latest press release…

• More than 400 million active users
• 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• More than 35 million users update their status each day
• More than 1.5 million local businesses have active Pages on Facebook
• Average user has 130 friends on the site
• Average user sends 8 friend requests per month
• Average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook
• About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States

As you can see, these are incredible numbers which can help you get your message out, send traffic to your website, and give you a great communication tool to reach out to other people around the world.

This week we’ll look at four different areas of Facebook. We will…

1. Create a Personal Facebook Page and add Custom Graphics to set it apart.
2. Setup Groups Within Our Personal Page to Separate Business and Family
3. Create a Facebook Fan Page to Showcase Our Talents
4. Tie in Facebook with our Twitter and other Social Media Accounts.

At the end of the week we’ll have a great platform created that will allow us to reach out to our friends, relatives, business acquaintances, and anyone interested in our particular niche.

As usual, we’ll take each task and make it easy to follow along with screen shots and step by step information. If you haven’t joined the Facebook revolution, come along this week and set one up. If you’ve been on for a while, you might be interested in creating a Fan page for your business or creative endeavor. We’ll even show you how to update your Facebook page on the fly from your cell phone using Twitter.