Ajax Girl

Seven Steps to Graphing Your Facebook Strategy

Written by on October 3rd, 2007 in Ajax News.

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This guest post is written by Dave McClure: startup advisor, angel investor, PayPal alumnus, and Master of 500 Hats. Dave is organizing next week’s Graphing Social Patterns conference on Facebook, covering many of the topics and companies mentioned below. He’s also a rookie instructor for a new Stanford class on Facebook apps, and an unapologetic Facebook Fanboy and social networking addict. Sections on virtual currency and ad networks contributed by Susan Wu, Charles River Ventures and Sundeep Ahuja, AppFuel.

For nostalgic hippies in the SF bay area, this was the 40th anniversary of 1967’s famous Summer of Love. But for every Silicon Valley developer, entrepreneur, and VC who has a pulse it’s been the Summer of Facebook.

While it’s easy to put aside geeky exuberance over the latest insanely great technology, it’s impossible to ignore the growing size and scope of Facebook, and the impact it’s having on internet startups and traditional businesses alike. Over half of Facebook’s 43 million users visit every day, spend an average of 20 minutes on the site, and view over 54 billion total page views per month.

In a few short months Facebook has quickly become one of the most impressive user acquisition channels on the web, rivaling SEO & SEM strategies for priority with new startups. Over 60 Facebook applications have more than 1 million total users, and over 40 have at least 100,000 daily users.

With the groundbreaking launch of the Facebook Platform this past spring, and the subsequent runaway growth of Facebook Apps adopted by millions of users this summer, the question on everyone’s lips (including Google and Microsoft) has been: “So what’s your Facebook strategy?”. If you’re still scrambling to figure out yours, read on.

Seven Steps to Graphing Social Patterns on Facebook

Personally I’ve become addicted to Facebook, and in particular with the Facebook Platform and the News Feed. I’ve spent hours upon hours experimenting with new ways it provides to connect and communicate, and recently began teaching a class at Stanford with Professor BJ Fogg on how to build Facebook apps. In this article i’ll explain how to use Facebook to make a big impact on your business, and why it’s substantially different than any other social network that’s come before.

Here are seven major aspects of Facebook you can use to increase the visibility of your startup, business, product or service:

1. Set Up Your Graph: Profiles & Privacy
2. Make Connections: Networks, Groups & Events
3. The Need for Feed: Your [Shared] Social Activity Stream
4. Share Your Content: Share & People-Tag Your Stories & Media
5. App to the Future: The Facebook Platform, APIs, & Applications
6. Pay to Play: Ad Networks, Sponsored Stories, & Paid Distribution
7. Show Me The Bunny: Gifts, Points, & Virtual Currency

I’ll explore each of these items in more detail after the jump. For developers and marketers interested in learning more, we’ll be covering these topics in depth next week in San Jose at Graphing Social Patterns, a conference on the business and technology of Facebook and social networking.

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