Food for thought – Google vs. Facebook
by Jim Peake
Here is some data I pulled from a Perry Marshall website. While it might not be 100% accurate the numbers are probably within some of the Facebook ballpark estimates. If these assumptions are remotely true then they are extremely impressive for Facebook.
- Facebook now has close to 700 million users
- 50% visiting each day
- 365 days per year
- Avg. 5 pages each per visit
- 5″ of ad space for each page
- 2.7 Trillion Inches of Ad Space currently
- Ad Space being added this year will be another 2 Trillion Inches
In a call I had with a client last night (May 11, 2011) we were getting philosophical about the Internet and ways that it impacted each of our businesses. He mentioned to me that the single reason he left his previous SEO supplier was because they said that “Facebook and social media offered nothing.” In paraphrasing they said “ok we’ll put up a fan page for you but it won’t do anything.” Those remarks lost his previous SEO supplier, a paying client, bad for them good for me. Even if the supplier was correct it was their thinking that got them into trouble. How can you make that type of a statement without “testing” first?
This client is not really adept at the Internet but he is far from stupid and he knows that in order to get ahead in this world you need to hire experts and let them do their thing. He offered his analysis on Google and Facebook. He said, “Google is robotic human thought, it is no more than an electronic phonebook, Facebook on the other hand is human function. There is a trust factor with Facebook and there is competition to be the best product.”
On the other hand there are businesses and people competing to beat Google at PPC and SEO, so if you really don’t have the best products or services and you know how to “beat Google” you “win” but you/we all really lose in the end. So his point here is that we need to be the best at what we do and not at beating Google, for Facebook this comes out when 10 or 100 or 10,000 people “like” your product or services. It means everything to someone evaluating a person or a service/product, compared to a placement on a search engine SERP page.
Why is the fact that other people “liking” a product or service so powerful? One word, TRUST. Trust is the single biggest converting attribute anywhere, trust converts. If I go to a Google PPC ad and I click on the link a lot of times I am being sent to a “landing page.” In this landing page environment I am being “sold” creditability with lots of copy and testimonials usually from strangers. But on Facebook this is not so, the trust factor are already there because my friends are there and I trust my friends.
This client of mine is in the addiction treatment field and really crystalized the point best by saying, “instead of being the best at beating Google be the best at what you are being in yourself and your business and everything will take care of itself.” And what he means by this is the normal stuff of doing all the right things and then going beyond. For example, he gets calls from people who have no money or are on Medicare that are suffering from addiction (he can’t profit from these folks) but he will take the time out to refer them to the government agencies who can provide some sort of assistance. He said that he feels that in some sort of way there is something spiritually positive about doing this for him and his business.
He also said that you’d be surprised at how many times a family calls asking for help who don’t have two nickels to rub together but a couple of days later he is on the phone with their neighbor arranging getting the person into treatment because the neighbor pitches in to make it happen. I don’t know if you call this good karma but it is nice to see happen when we do the right thing.