Jackson Lo

I attended the SOHO SME Small Medium Enterprise Expo this weekend which took place at the National Art Center in Ottawa. The event featured keynotes, seminar and panel sessions, entrepreneur spotlights, visit exhibits and displays and networking opportunities.

Keynote speaker, Alfredo Tan, Senior Director at Facebook, was the main attraction that brought me to this event. Alfredo's talk, The World Has Gone Social and That’s Why Businesses Need to Harness the Power of Friends Influencing Friends, brought forth interesting research about Facebook users and the world of social media. The most interesting story must have been Coca Cola's Village 2010. Those who attended the village were given a wrist band that contained a RFID tag allowed them to, in real-time, share their experience of the Village with their friends on Facebook, bringing the virtual world of Facebook, into the real world of The Village. Check out this promotional video of the Coca Cola Village. 

Alfredo's presentation ended with a great Q&A session. I put forth my question about the new Facebook Group, and whether they had any plans of having the opt-in option. At this point, he stated that Facebook has no plans of that with the new Groups application.

There were valuable information exchanged during the Q&A session, many of which users aren't aware of. Here I will share the ones I was able to get down on my phone. 

Target Your Status Updates to Only the People You Want Seeing It

Within Facebook, you can share updates with your friends via the What's on your mind? text bar. But what if you didn't want ALL your friends seeing your status update? Is there a way of doing that? Yes.

Before you Share your updates, take a look at the privacy options you have next the Share button. You can customize your update status and exclude or only include the people you want to see your update. You can also set those customized status update groups as your default if you like. Here's a screenshot of the customize option screen. 

You can also update your status through Twitter if you have the Twitter to Facebook Application installed. Or, if you've read my post on the effectiveness of using Selective Tweets to send updates from Twitter to your Facebook account, you can do that also. 

Use Facebook do Your Market Research and Market Segmentation 

Have you created a Facebook ad before? If not, then you may want to try this out. Follow along with me:

1. Click Advertising at the bottom of your screen (make sure your browser is on the Facebook page). 
2. Click Create an Ad. 
3. Enter some dummy information into the fields that are required (this is just a test to show you how powerful this tool is). 

Now the Targeting section should appear under the Design your Ad section. Here you will be able to specify the area you want to target, demographics, likes and interests, connections on Facebook, plus some advanced targeting settings. Facebook will present a live estimation of the reach you will get with your ad. With over 500 million active users on Facebook, the potential of getting your message out is quite good if you ask me. 

Here's a quick example of what you can get when you are look at who in Ottawa likes Macbook Pro and Ipod Touch. The total reach is 1,100. That means there are 1,100 users on Facebook in Ottawa that like these two products. 

Related Posts and Wikipedia on Community Pages 

This better explained with an example. If you search Pizza in the Facebook search bar, you will be brought to, hopefully, to the Pizza Interest page. Here you should see Related Posts and a Wikipedia link to the left side. The Related Posts page will show any post that has the word 'pizza' in its context, given that the user allows their message to be publicly displayed. You will also be able to see what your friends  are talking about, in this case, about pizza. There is a Wikipedia link that connects users to the Wikipedia page within Facebook. Alfredo showed us a more comprehensive example but I had forgotten some of what he said. You are able to see Bing results too, but can't seem to find that on the Pizza page.

That is the last bit of what what was discussed, which I thought could be useful to you. I will finish off with a question. If you study psychology or even Facebook, you may have an idea what the answer may be. If you do, I'd like for you to share that comment in the box below. 

It is said that Facebook has a special number that it references when new users join Facebook. People who are new to Facebook often ask what the big deal Facebook is when they get started (because they have no connection, no friends on their list yet). So, what number is Facebook talking about when they say, once users reach 'x' number of friends, they will more like NOT to leave Facebook. I don't have the answer to that question, neither do I think any non-Facebook employee would know it.