Facebook trumps email campaigning?
Me: “Yeah i think the next big question is going to be about how we can harvest emails from Facebook communities’”
Friend: “But do you even need to? Why not just use Facebook to communicate with your supporters. I pay more attention to my Facebook messages than email.”
Facebook has 300 million members globally, nearly 7 million in Australia - and - get this, over 51% of those check it daily and spend and average of 21 minutes on the site.
It is the stickiest site on the internet. It’s where Australians are spending most of their time on the net and yet online campaigners are still in an email collecting frenzy. Facebook campaign attempts have been pithy at best - except by a few corporates.
The usual reprieve is that users don’t value their Facebook messages as much as they do email. But then again, now days an organisation is VERY lucky if 20% of their database even open their emails. I wonder what the Facebook stats would be… especially given most people will get it twice: once in their email inbox and another time through Facebook mail.
The other great (and obvious) benefits of Facebook are that users can take action without ever leaving the system, all their friends will also find out and you can advertise to people based on everything they do on Facebook - (namely their interests, groups they are in, age and location) which can guarantee you a lead community if you have an inkling of knowledge about your audience.
And how about acquiring that priority relationship? It can be challenging at best to acquire a large email list, but to get the rights to email a Facebook’er and have your comments turn up in their feed they just need to ‘fan’ you.
But what about the people, who is even on Facebook? Isn’t it mostly young people?
Well yeah somewhat - but not really. In Australia there are 6.9 million users with a slight skew to females across all ages. Breaking it down with ages:
13-19: 1.4 million
20-29: 2.6 million
30-39: 1.5 million
40-49: 770 000
50-59: 430 000
60-64: 100 000
Rumor (and basic logic) has it that the fastest growing ages are 30 and above, but there are already enough people in all age ranges to comprise major campaigns (even middle age women who make up most of online NGO donor bases).
Seems to me that Facebook is where it’s at and we all need to catch up…. (Ok, i am way over selling this - all i’m saying is that i’m going to spend more time thinking about ways to campaign within Facebook and i hope you will too.)
