The Science of Facebook Marketing

Yesterday, Dan Zarrella, a social media scientist at Hubspot, hosted a webinar on Facebook marketing. Despite some technical difficulties at the beginning, Zarrella seemed to cover the ins and outs of reaching and targeting an audience on the most popular social networking site, Facebook.

His presentation came complete with "tweetable" takeaways and unforgettable advice about profiles vs. pages. If you've been practicing Facebook marketing for years and using it in your personal life, you pretty much could have caught on to much of what he presented. However for those of us who are always interested in learning more and may not consider ourselves experts, there was some key takeaways from his presentation.

By age:
1. To reach a younger audience, focus on the social aspect of Facebook.
2. To reach an older audience, focus on targeting interests, hobbies and likes.

By gender:
1. Women describe themselves more fully on Facebook than men.
2. Women tend to have more wall posts than men.
3. More women are in relationships on Facebook than men. (More men are listed as single than women)

By medium:
1. Twitter is for marketing/journalist geeks (like us) and is quick (140 characters or less)
2. Video sharing is more effective on Facebook

By linguistics:
1. The most shared content is "sex" (surprising?) More importantly, the second most is positive
2. The least shared content is negative
*People want to share positive content, not negative.

Bottom line is that Facebook is mainstream, so think mainstream when using it as a marketing tool. Twitter is not mainstream and LinkedIn is professional. Most likely a large portion of your target audience is on Facebook if they use the Internet. As always, keep your message simple, but interesting, and know your audience.