Interested in Marketing on Social Networks? Ask Yourselves These Key Questions.

According to Nielsen’s latest industry report on social networks, time spent on Facebook has grown nearly 700% year-over-year. This growth is nothing short of meteoric. In April 2008, users spent 1.7 billion minutes on Facebook. In April 2009, the monthly time spent had grown to 13.9 billion. These numbers reflect a demographic widening of Facebook’s user base, but also a deepening of engagement that’s never been seen before in the history of either social networks or the internet.

Savvy brands are now setting out to understand how to capture these billions of minutes of rapt attention. This is a nascent field that’s just starting to see real research, testing, and execution — but everyone is paying attention, and brands are beginning to jump into the water feet first.

Accordingly, here at Involver we ask a series of guiding questions each day:

• How are users interacting with brands? What motivates them to want to receive marketing messages? How do brands show them content in the format they desire?
• What messages are brands trying to communicate? How can we lower the barrier to understanding what their customers are actually looking for?
• How can we use Facebook to increase the information and multimedia available to a brand’s existing and potential audiences? How can we promote brand affinity by increasing the frequency and quality of engaging “touch points” between a brand and a given user?

Without a doubt, these questions are helping us forge some promising blueprints: companies are using Involver’s Facebook marketing suite to develop and sustain countless enthusiast relationships.

With old forms of advertising (especially print advertising) being hit hard currently, there’s a huge urgency to look for a new and readily scalable marketing channel — and Facebook provides this channel through its loyal and highly active user base.

In any event, brands big and small will continue to improve their ROI by increasing their digital marketing spend on social networks. Hundreds of billions of minutes in engagement over the next year alone constitute an unprecedented and largely untapped opportunity.

We hope that you’ll join in us in thinking about the above questions. And as a follow-up, we hope that you’ll also ask yourselves: “How are we going to capture the massive attention on social networks and make people care about our brand — how are we going to stand out?”

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