How does Facebook work?
How does Facebook work?
Many (small business) people ask me “How does Facebook work“?
And “How can it be profitable for my business?”.
I’ll try to answer that question below from a business point of view.
Before explaining how Facebook works, let me ask you first:
Why are you on Facebook?
Or, if you aren’t yet, why would you join?
When you search for an answer on the Net, you’ll see that many reasons are given, but in my opinion there’s a growing trend in nowadays individualized society to express oneself as an individual in a group they create themselves!
More and more people like to be showcased on TV and on the Internet. They want to be heard.
That desire is mainly based on one of the most striking human characteristics:
people like to belong to a community!
only… a community they LIKE.
Social networks use that in their advantage.
How does Facebook work?
So, to answer the question Why Facebook, there basically are three real reasons:
- to build contacts and find lost ones,
- to profile and express yourself for whatever reason or
- to do business.
Pick any of these reasons and you can use the other 2 within it. And that’s easy to do on Facebook, because you can cross-communicate.
On his Facebook blog, Mark Zuckerberg says:
When we built Facebook in 2004, our goal was to create a richer, faster way for people to share information about what was happening around them. We thought that giving people better tools to communicate would help them better understand the world, which would then give them even greater power to change the world.
Emphasis is on ‘around them’.
You see, whenever YOU connect to someone on Facebook, by inviting her/him as a friend, THEY become part of your unique, personal newsfeed. You are able to read their messages and responses.
Thus you get feedback and new opinions from all Friends in your network, which on its turn invokes reactions from you and others.
It’s this newsfeed that makes Facebook a social network and simple ideas can spread like wildfire reaching a crowd in no time.
Are you beginning to see the answer to the question “How does Facebook work”?
The same applies to Facebook’s Fanpages. If you see one of your friends join an interesting fan page, you may want to join too. And that action may even invoke your friends to join. If that happens, you have a snowball effect.
That’s why Fanpages are popular amongst companies. Once the gets a lot of fans, they can update their page and their newsfeed spreads this message amongst all these fans.
Take a look at this one and notice the number people who like this page in the menu at the left!
See?
Now, I don’t say you can achieve results like this big company, but still this can be very interesting for your business, because…
…there’s a distinction between Friends and Fans in my opinion.
Friend can be REAL friends, but also any person who invites you to be a friend, even if you don’t know this person.
Even if you know the person that invites you very well, they may not be real friends. Great examples are parents who invite their children. Is this social family control? Don’t they see their children at home? Do the children want to accept?
Fans are a whole other breed. They’ve expressed their interest in the topic by becoming a fan. Voluntarily! Because they liked what they saw.
Seeing a friend become a fan therefore has a huge impact. And then the personal recommendation kicks in. People tend to buy faster if something is recommended by a friend.
That’s the answer to the question “How does Facebook work”!
Are you seeing possibilities here?
If you’re interested in how to create and use highly successful ads on Facebook, just sign up for my newsletter at the top left and you’ll get 6 videos explaining how to do just that.
So, what do you think about how Facebook works?
Post your comments below
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