I am more than 100% convinced that 2010 will be the year of Social Networking Marketing and facebook will lead the pack. The latest social network marketshare for November 2009 show that facebook is already having more than 46% marketshare among the US bound SocNet traffic. Since majority of the Internet marketing at the moment focus around the North America, this is a big number. Exactly an year ago, facebook’s marketshare was less than 20% and MySpace was a biggie then. In a years’ time the scene has totally changed. Facebook just beat its competition by providing a simpler unified user interface for all those features that others had in bits and pieces. They managed to do all these in a short timespan and hence ate into others’ marketshare. In other words what MyBlogLog, Twitter, Picasa etc could do separately now can be done with facebook. The relevance of blog directories and blog search engines are reducing now as facebook streams in that information as well.
As people are spending more and more time online (and that too mainly on Social Network) the purchasing decisions in the future will be revolving around what they see and hear on Social Network and friends’ circle. In short, more than search engines, review sites and forums, Social Network will soon become the main base for online sales success.
PPC Advertising can deliver ads over geographies and pre-defined channels. But what a Social Network biggie like facebook can offer is to place the ads not only based on geography but based on other important parameters like their sex, individual tastes, types of friends and community they belong to, what they are talking about and looking for etc. because they have all this information in the profile data of the member. This simply means that real context aware ads will soon be a reality in the case of facebook advertising.
Facebook fan pages will soon do wonders by driving convertible traffic to your online content. If you do not have a facebook fan page yet, you might want to build one now because these will totally replace blog directories soon.