First up: Facebook
This social networking tool has grown up. A couple of years ago it was a small, college-centric community. Now we are looking at a global network that has 150 million subscribers worldwide and half of those are logging in every day, according to company sources. The magic is this – Facebook employs a number of ways for companies to reach their members.

The first level is the sidebar ads. On just about every page, Facebook has display ads, usually three with a picture, some text and a link. Those ads, while more pricey than Google Adwords content clicks, can be more profitable than your Google campaigns. The key is that Facebook allows you to drill down your demographic to almost individual levels. You can assign a campaign to show to men under 30 who live in California who have the word skateboard in their profile. Since Facebook has access to so much personal information in the form of user profiles, they can offer very niche marketing to any online business.

The second level of advertising available on Facebook comes in the form of groups/fan pages. You can set up your own fan pages to which Facebook members subscribe. This allows you to post relevant articles about your business, specials, videos, audio, or just get user feedback. Groups also let you email all members of the group so you can keep in contact with them directly with email.

Third, you can develop your own applications that interface with Facebook directly. The best example of this is Google Calendar. With the Google Calendar application, you can display your calendar on your Facebook profile. This provides exposure to Google and the users get to share their appointments with their Facebook friends. Many of the applications also employ ads so that their displays can be monetized with ad revenue.

Lastly, there is a guerilla strategy I see some people employ, which I don’t promote, but don’t deny works. One marketer I know adds anyone he can to his Friend list and then uses his status updates to promote specials, videos about his products, or just to get attention for a client. He has hundreds of Friends and probably gets a couple of clicks for every status update he posts. Considering that status updates are free, this isn’t a bad ROI unless you count the time he takes to put up the post. At that level, he’s probably breaking even on his ad cost.

Facebook has captured hundreds of millions of users in a closed network. Google can’t search Facebook. No search engine can search Facebook. That means to get to those users, you have to use their service. My experience is that Facebook isn’t evil, and that means good things for those of us who want to use it for marketing and promotion.