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How Facebook Threatens Google's Dominance

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Written by Katya Small | 06 December 2010

 

It is difficult to believe that only a few years ago Facebook was born in a college student's dorm room as a way to connect students with each other. It is even harder to believe that more recently the networking giant was the province of students sharing their course schedules and posting pictures of themselves at parties. Facebook, in a very short period of time, has gone from that narrow, 18- to 24-year-old audience to a global one and has become a force to be reckoned with.

For businesses, Facebook represents a unique way to communicate with customers and to attract new ones that far outstrips the interaction available from traditional and online advertising channels, such as Google Ads, wherein companies pay for advertisements on the sidebar and top of search results related to their business.

Beyond the ability to interact directly with customers, Facebook offers businesses the ability to create pages that their customers can "like", and therefore, endorse to their friends, family, colleagues and any other acquaintances who happen to see their recommendation on their Facebook news feed. While Google has a Twitter knock-off, Google Buzz, it is dubious whether it has even a fraction of the users or traffic that Facebook generates.

For businesses, the best advertising in the world is free because it is the genuine and enthusiastic recommendation of their products or services from one consumer to his or her friends and family, and Facebook facilitates this marketing technique. Facebook allows businesses to set up their own pages for free, making the only barrier to entry for even the smallest of businesses the time it takes to set up and manage an account.

It is easier than designing a Web page and hoping that search-engine bots will include it in their results. And it  requires far less maintenance than a website whose content, tags and design must be continually evaluated to ensure that they remain current.

As Facebook continues to evolve, so do the business pages that it contains, which means that as Web browser standards change, Facebook's pages automatically do so, as well.

The bottom line for all marketing endeavors undertaken by businesses, especially small- and medium-sized businesses that often operate without room for error in their operating budgets: the advertising that attracts the most people for the smallest cost is best.

Click here to read more about Facebook versus Google.

Click here to read about importing your Gmail contacts into Facebook.

For advice on creating and setting up your business on Facebook or any of the hundreds of other social media platforms available, contact NewMediaPlus by clicking here.

Click here to view the full article: http://bit.ly/hvos01