eHarbor eCommerce Marketing Blog

By Robert Lockard

Facebook is one of the highest-profile members of the social-media revolution that took hold of the Internet four years ago. One question on many people’s minds is: Is Facebook on the verge of becoming profitable and going public? That might be a giant step for the social-media industry.

I read about Facebook’s amazing growth and current struggles in a Fortune magazine article, entitled “Is Facebook losing its glow?” The article points out a lot of interesting statistics about the company, such as:

- 850 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day.

- 8 million videos are uploaded to Facebook every day.

- 70 percent of Facebook’s users are outside the United States.

- Facebook’s revenue in 2008 totaled $280 million.

Those are impressive numbers. And to think that in 2004 hardly anyone had ever heard of Facebook. Or Twitter, MySpace or YouTube, for that matter. Clearly, these websites are doing something right to become so successful, and people around the world want to be a part of them.

But Facebook has yet to make a profit because it relies mainly on advertising for its revenue. And online advertising is cheap, as any newspaper or other traditional media provider will tell you. I’m not sure how social-media sites will earn a profit without eventually charging their customers a fee for some services.

Online consumer spending is expected to increase in the next several years, and a growing number of marketers are climbing onto the ecommerce bandwagon. Maybe social-media sites can take advantage of this trend, too.

But they might lose a large number of current and potential subscribers. Facebook bases its whole business model on generating new customers, so it might be difficult for it to transition to developing the quality of its customers instead of quantity.

Speaking of social media and marketing, on April 14, 2009, I attended Hubspot’s largest Webinar ever, which was called “How to Use Social Media to Attract More Customers.” Brent Leary, co-founder and partner of CRM Essentials, led this awesome presentation. I hope to discuss the lessons I learned at this Webinar in a future blog entry.

I just can’t help pointing out that the Fortune article had several obvious spelling and grammar mistakes. I pointed out mistakes in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, so I think it’s fair to do the same in Fortune magazine.

- Most of that came directly from banner ads, and a substantial chunk was still coming from a deal with Microsoft in which the Internet behemoth sold traditional banner ads, which cost as little as $0.15 cents per one thousand ads shown to users.
This is a common mistake. $0.15 cents is equal to $.0015. When people say this they usually mean $0.15 or 15 cents, not both.

- In 2008, the company brought in an estimated $280 milion.
In Spanish, this would be the correct spelling of “million,” but not in English.

- More than 131,000 users became a fan of the national pizza franchise saw traffic to its site jump 253%.
This is a clear case of rewriting a sentence and forgetting to make it fit together properly.

I have another really cool thing to share from this article, but I’ll save that for another blog entry. Be sure to check the eHarbor Blog to stay posted on good news in the world of ecommerce, search engine optimization and other topics like these. You can also follow us on Twitter.

You can take advantage of SEO tactics and succeed in the world of ecommerce with the help of eHarbor and its affiliates, which include Magellan Commerce, Real Estate Promoter and Submit Solution.

The photo of the “facebook” is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of _Max-B.