Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Learning about Facebook

We had a great guest speaker last week talk to us about the pros and cons of marketing via Facebook on the same day that Facebook turned 5 years old! Rodney Rumford went through a very detailed presentation, discussing with students various methods of advertising as well as the differences between Facebook profiles, pages, and groups. If you need help remembering the difference, here is a good, short post about putting your business on Facebook.

We also talked about why a company would want to be involved with Facebook, and we looked at the example of Ernst and Young (from the Groundswell book, our class textbook). Ernst and Young uses this social network as a way to recruit as well as a way to communicate with college students, interns, and E&Y employees. They have nearly 26,000 fans (people who have raised their hand to say they want to be connected to E&Y this way), and employees actively encourage and respond to questions from potential employees.

The question I left with my students last week was this: should companies use Facebook for marketing? I am looking forward to seeing their answers tonight. There are certainly many companies that do! Just this week, I joined the fan page for Barbie and for In-n-Out Burgers.

(Photo credit: junaed)

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