Facebook is a great resource for networking and advertising. Depending on your niche it may not be for you. All my research is based off of a sports site and the things I've done so results may vary (even if your a sports forum). You may do better, you may not.

Also, it should be noted that the general userbase for Facebook is most likely college students or recently graduated students. You probably don't want to use it to advertise a AARP website.

All of this information is assuming you have a brief understanding of the different things on Facebook and may tell you a few things that you didn't know you could utilize in such a way.

Applications

Facebook has tons of applications. In sports, they have a mini community type set up for each team for all sports. This was great for me as I could target specific teams. Each of these applications came with a homepage type setup with a forum, video, and links section.

I was able to start a trash talking topic in each team as well as submit a link in each teams section. This was great as not only did it bring links in during that time frame it's residual (couldn't think of the word I really wanted to use). I haven't posted information on these applications in over 2 weeks and am still receiving 100+ uniques a month from them. (they show up differently than other Facebook referrals)

Another great idea is to build your own application for your site. I haven't done this yet but didn't need to as the sports applications that were already out there achieved exactly what I wanted. BamaStangGuy has done this and would be better to detail how the results from that are. But this will target users that are specifically interested in that niche and it's free advertising.

In summary for the applications, use things that are related to your niche. It wouldn't make sense for me to add an application for something like web masters. While it may yield some results, people installing this application are more interested in web master things than sports.

Groups

There is also a wonderful thing on Facebook where you can create a group.... (more coming soon have to take a break)

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TheBiggestBoards - See where your forum ranks - Size Matters!

And if you haven't yet heard about it, Facebook has recently released their new advertising platform...In fact, they revamped it and made a major announcement/release just a day or so ago.

Facebook ads are powerful. When they first came out a couple months ago, they were a gold mine for advertisers. That's because it was brand new for Facebook, though...They've since "tightened down the hatches" a bit and things are not quite as crazy anymore. But...the facebook CPC advertising still has a lot of potential. You can do more targeting there than I've seen anywhere else. You can target age, gender, interests, relationship status, location, etc...

They have a lot of new stuff though, read about it here - Facebook | The Facebook Blog

Facebook is powerful. It's just so new to everybody, so we're all still trying to figure out how to harness that power

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Groups

There is also a wonderful thing on Facebook where you can create a group specifically dedicated to your site. (this is not to get mixed up with Facebook's new area for pages) These are groups you can join or create and invite friends and let friends invite friends.

Whether this is really productive is yet to bee seen. I have had some results from it but it seems more like a waste of time in most cases. In the event that you are going to utilize groups, here's a few things you should do (I wouldn't focus too much time on groups)

• Create a group yourself with links and information about your website
• Join other related groups (especially those that don't have an official page)
  • You can post links, write on walls, start discussions.
  • Not all groups will allow links, that's ok, join anyways.
  • You don't want to to post links in the discussions or the wall writings until you've been around for a while as members will report it as spam.

As you can see the results from this may be slim but Ryan can confirm I fully go after this as I recently joined a group he was in for the upcoming UGA game to blackout Auburn. I made my link and description specific to that group. I talked about their running back and the recent win over the Gators and used that to try to motivate people to at least check it out.

In summary for the groups, it's a good resource but reservations must be used in posting links in topics and wall writings and reserve them for the links area where you are able to post links. The results probably aren't as good here so don't devote as much time to using Facebook in this method. It's great to post major updates in your own group to let people know it's an active thing.

Events

Events are another section on Facebook that can be utilized. This is more of a direct group of people you'll reach (mainly friends only)... more coming soon.

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TheBiggestBoards - See where your forum ranks - Size Matters!

I'm utilizing this as well but am putting the paid advertising stuff at the end of my report.

Quick little tidbit... today so far from around 6PM: 118,698 impressions.

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I haven't gotten my application submitted yet so its just going off word of mouth through my sites. As soon as I get the icon for it from Caddy I'll submit it. Says it usually takes 3 days to get it approved. Then it will be the only Ford Mustang app on facebook....

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Hopefully I'll be able to finish my little research paper today but there's a lot of stuff to write. It's about 8 different sections.

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Facebook needs to badly improve before I would even consider advertising there. Very slow servers and most applications when you use them come back with an error message.

Facebook is faster than MySpace. The applications aren't facebooks thus the reason errors may occur. I think over the past 6 months I've encountered 5 errors. And I probably caused most of them by clicking multiple things and confusing the application.

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TheBiggestBoards - See where your forum ranks - Size Matters!

I have a group for my community although I haven't quite leveraged it yet. I also did Facebook flyers pro and have just started a new cpc ad campaign with them. It's definitely worth trying out.

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