Issue 2, vol. 3 - March 2007

In our October 15 newsletter (called The MySpace Shift), we highlighted Facebook as the next big contender in the online social networking space. We noted that just weeks earlier, Facebook removed student-only restrictions and opened up the site to anyone with an email address. We were instantly hooked. Facebook's usability, privacy controls and unique features allow you to instantly connect with friends (and friends of friends) in an incredibly fresh way.

Unlike other social networking sites such as MySpace, Windows Live Spaces or Hi5, Facebook does not initially publish your profile publicly on the Web, but instead makes it visible only to people in your network – however you choose to define it. Which means you can link to everyone else in your city, or your school, or your workplace, depending – while limiting the "outsiders” who have contact with you.

What's truly amazing about Facebook, though, is how it allows you to instantly connect with old friends and new friends alike and literally let you see those connections in real-time. Add to that the unique Feeds feature that publishes the activities of your entire network, the embedded ability to Share anything with your friends, and the ease-of-use of adding and Tagging photos, and Facebook simply provides the perfect digital tool for really what is already "the language" of anyone under the age of 30. It's made Facebook the number one photo sharing site in the World with more than 7 million new photos posted every day, above and beyond the simple ability to send another user a specific message or a "Poke” to let them know you've been looking at them (although you can do both of those things, as well).

So why is all this important? Because Facebook has EXPLODED in Canada in the last three months, and has become even more significant here than in the US. Facebook did not exist on the online media landscape in Canada six months ago: it was, until late September of last year, only open to members of recognized student networks (read: people with valid e-mail addresses from school that were members). Today, Facebook is the number five most visited Web site in Canada according to Alexa's global Web metrics traffic counts (and really, Facebook is more like the number four Web brand here, as Alexa counts Google.com and Google.ca as two sites). This puts Facebook as one of the most important Web sites in Canada just after Google, MSN and Yahoo!. That's huge, but think of it this way: Facebook gets more traffic than massively popular destinations for Canadian youth, like YouTube, MySpace, wikipedia, EBay, Blogger, Amazon, CBC, and NHL.com. This isn't to say it's still the only online game in town... MSN is still the number two Web site in Canada and easily the most significant tool for messenging. Right now, Facebook is adding more than 10,000 new Canadian users a day! And of those users, 73% of them use the site every day. From January to now, Facebook has added more than 600,000 new users, bringing the Canadian audience to more than 1.5 million uniques.

Considering now that the largest percentage of Facebook users are young people, this is a massive story in youth marketing in Canada. The pure speed of growth of Facebook combined with the tight demographic is a downright astonishing development in media and marketing and Canadian youth marketers have no choice but to take notice.

So what can Canadian youth marketers do? First off, hire an agency who understands this space and can execute within this environment appropriately. Privacy, sponsorship, and corporate-intrusion are sticky points with the online social networking set, and doing it wrong is a sure-fire brand killer.

The good news is that you can leverage Facebook to make an impact on your brand if executed correctly. The first step, beyond getting your own profile to check it out, is to search for Groups that Facebook users may have created already around your brand. Many of our clients are surprised to see the number of groups and number of users who are already building communities around their brands (remember, the consumer is in control). Hunt for anything: Victoria's Secret's Pink group (which is "sponsored", meaning it's paid for and corporately-created) has over 300,000 members (!) but there are massive numbers of consumer-created groups around some of the most significant brands in youth culture: Pepsi, for instance, has more than 500 "unofficial" groups of consumers, including some who simply want to talk about their love for the product and others who want to petition for the re-introduction of bygone flavours.

As the barriers between our consumer lives and our personal lives fall, sites like Facebook become a more important part of one's marketing mix. If you're looking for a greater understanding of how to navigate this new media landscape, we'd love to help: ask to see our "Culture in Transition" presentation by contacting Jeff Roach at jeff@youthography.com.. Unless, of course, you're already on Facebook yourself - send me a message or give me a Poke. You know where to find me.