The most searched for term on search
engines? Bebo. The most used website in Ireland Ireland
While seen as a place where young people
congregate, many over the age of 18 are on Bebo too. Many have said they joined
because their friends were on it and only joined because they were missing out
on what their peers were doing. Being seen as a place for kids, a messy place,
full of noise and yet those saying that still join the service is a testament
to the drawing power of Bebo.
You can engage with people on Bebo through
various means. You can create a profile for your brand/company/product and
stick it up there and hope people will connect with it and see what you're up
to. You can create a "Skin" for your product and share it with
everyone. But for your profile and skin you are competing with millions of
others and 100s of 10000s of skins. You can enlist Bebo however to promote both
so that your profile can be a highlighted profile and your skin can be a
highlighted skin. This does not come cheap.
A recent example of this is the Pat the
Baker profile and Skin. The profile now has 1000s of friends, has
"whacky" competitions getting people to sing the theme and submit
photos of themselves with Pat the Baker sliced pans. The look of the profile
changes frequently which someone probably considered was a way of keeping
people's attention. It won't.
Why Pat the Baker thought Bebo was a way of
getting more people to buy sliced pans is a mystery. Brand recognition? Kids
don't buy sliced pans and in the world of pester power they probably use their
quota to have other items bought.
LinkedIn:
LinkedIn is a business focused social
network where you can upload the equivalent of your CV and share it with
others. One of the features of LinkedIn is that you can send a message to 10
contacts at a time or send it in the form of a question to everyone at once and
they in turn can forward that on to everyone else.
While it might harp back to email chain
letters, the profile of LinkedIn means that it is very possible to reach a good
deal of potential ProductX buyers via CompanyA staff and their supporters
sending a message to all their contacts asking to spread the word about
ProductX.
Facebook:
Facebook has gone from 7000 Irish users in
January 2007 to 400,000 Irish users in January 2009. Facebook started off as a
network for college kids and the core look of the site is of a very clean
interface which focuses more on information that the look. Most profiles on
Facebook look almost the same with the only places on the profile where people
can express themselves is on the Wall and in various applications that people
can add. There are 150 Million users of Facebook worldwide.
Creating a Facebook Page
Facebook encourages companies not to create
a Facebook profile for their brand, product or company but instead to create a
Facebook Page which will give a company more control than a profile and can
assign ownership of it to multiple people. If you create a Facebook Profile
for your company or brand it will get nuked by them quickly enough and with
it all the work you put into it. Register yourself on Facebook using a Profile,
register your company with a Facebook Page.
One of the advantages a Facebook page has
over a normal profile is that you can get statistics on usage of the page. In
addition you are able to send a message to everyone that is a “Fan” of the page
without everyone being able to reply all. Something a profile does not offer.
Creating a Facebook Page is very easy.
Simply to go the Facebook Page section of Facebook and choose Create Page or
else use this direct link: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
This will bring you to the creation page.
Choose what area of business you want your page listed under or click Brand or
the Artist option. Here we want to create a Fan Page for the Grapefruit Moon
Café:
