Lotame

Here are a quick 5 reasons why you should build a Facebook Fan Page:

1) Reach over 200,000,000 users

According to Mashable, “Twitter and Facebook Post Huge Growth Numbers in March,” Facebook grows about 23% every month and just below 200% in one year. Your Fan Page will continue to gain exposure to more and more users as time goes on.

2) Instantly send news updates regarding your company/industry

With the click of a button, your updates will be posted to the infamous Facebook “minifeed” for everyone to see. Besides the “minifeed,” the news can be sent directly to your fans alerting them that you have updated information.

3) Make your company more social with photos and videos

Clients want to be comfortable working with you. The photos and videos will allow them to get to know your company easily enabling them to put a face to the voice.

4) People who are not on Facebook can still find your Fan Page through online searches

This is a huge benefit to the Fan Page. For those few online users who do not have a Facebook account, they can still read all of the information on the Fan Page.  People who do not have an account will not have the ability to receive updates.

5) For consumer goods, you can upload coupons or other types of discounts to those who are only a Fan of your company, potentially increasing your following

This can be a tool to reward those customers who engage in your product and decide to follow your company. It can be as small as a weekly discount to a chance to win prizes. This benefit is only for those Facebook users that are your fans.

The Facebook fan page is a free and helpful tool for every company, regardless of your industry. It will increase your reach allowing you to instantly alert your fans of important information. Make your Fan page today. If you have found any other reasons to make a Fan, please share them in the comments section.

This week Alan Levy, CEO of Blog Talk Radio, will be joining me in a open conversation about how podcasting and online radio can help brands in their marketing effort.

Besides being a super guy, Alan, along with Bob Charish founded BlogTalkRadio in August 2006. The concept for BlogTalkRadio was developed by Levy as he mourned his father’s passing. Levy maintained a blog, to update his family and friends on his father’s health - and later as a memorial to his life. Levy thought by combining blogging and telecommunications, a true immediate two-way interactive online platform could be established. This led to the birth of BlogTalkRadio.

Please join us as we explore how to effectively use this new platform for marketing.

Join us @11:30 EST on Thursday 4/30 over at Blog Talk Radio.

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This week we will be speaking with Michal Bortnik, VP of Products and Vlada Breiburg, VP of Business Development from AdNectar. Ad Nectar promises to turn customers into brand advocates through the simple act of giving branded virtual gifts. Typically fielded on social networks, an AdNectar campaign consists of a virtual gift selected from a catalog, an embedded landing unit with rich-media functionality, plus campaign optimization, viral functionality, and reporting.

Join Michal and Vlada as we explore what Virtual Gifts in tandem with Social Media brings to the world of marketing, user generated content, and social web.

Join us @11:30 EST on Thursday 4/30 over at Blog Talk Radio.

The Nielsen Company just released a very good report entitled “The Global Online Media Landscape: Identifying Opportunities in a Challenging Market.”

Of particular note are some of the data points on page 6 of the report which compares 3 year and 6 year growth of Search, Video, and Social Media…the growth metrics are unreal and understated; Nielsen doesn’t categorize usage of content sites that have Social Media / community “extensions” in their totals, for example CNN.com use of citizen reporting (iReport)

View the report below

Nielsen report

Our friends at MySpace just released a study, featured in AdAge, on the impact of Social Media from an ROI perspective. They partnered with an offline tracking program, Dunnhumby, which runs loyalty programs for supermarket retailers and has access to loyalty-card purchase data from 59 million people in the U.S. The campaign in question was for an unnamed personal-care brand that ran a $1 million campaign on MySpace last year, including a contest in which members submitted videos of themselves and friends for others in the network to vote on. (I think that this was P&G’s Crest promotion, but that is just an educated guess.) The study which described the reach and click thru rates as being below average, also uncovered the most important statistic:

It produced $1.28 million in offline sales, as measured by Dunnhumby, which compared purchases among shoppers not exposed to the campaign with purchases among those who were. That amounted to a 28% return on investment, not counting returns from repeat sales among consumers the brand won via the campaign.

This is good news for those people who searching for answers surrounding effective measurement tools to understand the value of a social media marketing campaign.

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