Edelman

I attended the Dublin Chamber of Commerce Business Breakfast Briefing event with Colm Long, Director of Online Operations for Facebook this morning.

Here’s a brief synopsis of what Colm spoke about, which included a lot of very interesting points:

• Obviously key to facebook is engagement, Colm referred to facebook as the “most engaging page on the internet” and a “social graph”
• Speaking about the creation of facebook he said that now successful businesses/start-ups are emerging in universities and colleges rather than “garages” and industry should be aware of this
• Facebook currently have 400 million users worldwide but they are aiming for 1 billion!  125 million facebook users are in western Europe and western Europe is rapidly outgrowing the United States
• Some interesting stats for Ireland – out of population of 4.2 million, 1.4 million are on facebook with 700,000 of these logging in every day and the fastest growing user group is 35+, which shows that facebook is not just for younger people, a point he emphasised repeatedly
• Facebook users are using it to replace email which they find “too slow” and key to facebook’s success is “real time” updates
• Mobile is a huge area and one they are planning to build on – 80 million facebook users do so on their mobile phone
• Colm said how online branding is currently “broken”, facebook aims to fix this.  He pointed to Guinness and their Area 22 campaign as leading the way with online branding, he also used the case of the Grand Canal theatre who have successfully built “an online community” and Hairy Baby T-shirt company who are very successful in turning online engagement into sales
• The key to facebook for business is that you can target your product at a set of people who have a particular set of interests
• An interesting point about news referral, facebook makes three times more referrals to news sites than google
• Gaming is another big area for revenue, companies that have developed games for facebook such as Farmville, Mafia Wars etc are making massive profits e.g. EA games bought Playfish for $400 million last year
• Colm also made the point that facebook are targeting apps such as Farmville for the next phase of “wealth creation” on the web, they want to build a credit system whereby credit that you earn on one app can be used to make purchases on another
• Interestingly, facebook view themselves in terms of Google and Yahoo, and don’t compare themselves to other social networks, currently the levels of loyalty and time spent among Facebook users are rapidly overtaking Google, Yahoo etc

Susan Flynn