Eee PR

Having known from the Top Social Media Sites 2008 that Facebook, one of the popular social networking sites, has massively grown 116% in a year reaching 200 million users, I am interested to look further into this.

What actually is people doing with social networking sites? How does it benefit the PR industry in being a channel to promote and engage brands with the public? According to the McCann research – the Social Media Tracker Wave 3 (conducted on March 08 ) – below are the things people typically do with their social networking profiles:

Click for Larger Image

The McCann research also mentioned that it is important to “exist inside social networks to create profiles, develop networks to distribute content and employ advertising and sponsorship to drive engagement with consumers.” I was curious to know how brands exist in those social networking sites so I decided to search for any existing branded-profiles in Facebook and here are some interesting one that I found:

• Apple Students, has 990,791 fans who have connected their profile with the Apple Students profile. You can get all the latest news of Apple products in here. There are also some interesting sections to attract its members by providing free songs to be downloaded and most importantly special discounts up to $200 for the student members.

• Twilight, the famous novel series and movies, has 1,089,950 fans. It provides links to the official websites, updates for the latest news, pictures and upcoming events for Twilight.

On the other hand, from the graph above we can also see that 23.3% users install applications on their social networking sites. Hence, I was searching again to find out whether there is any branded-application exists in Facebook and actually there are quite many! Here are just a few examples:

• Send Ben and Jerry Ice Cream application, allows users to send virtual Ben and Jerry ice cream to each other. It has 75 different flavours of the real ice cream to be sent out. It also provides reviews and discussion board sections. Currently, there are 36,904 monthly active users sending out those virtual ice creams to each other.

• Virtual iPhone is one interesting application that allows people to explore the iPhone device virtually. There are discussion boards, reviews section, etc posted by Facebook users who have added this application to their profiles. You can see that there is also a lucky draw to win an iPhone simply by adding this application to the profile. As such, this is one interesting way to engage people to participate. Virtual iPhone currently has 4,969 fans in Facebook.

It is very impressive to see that these brands succeed in connecting their brands with the Facebook users simply by asking the users to be fans of the brand’s or the product’s profile or by installing an application onto their profiles. In my upcoming blog posts, there will be some tips on how to be successful in using social networking sites as a channel for PR. So come back soon!