It takes getting eyeballs to see your product or service, millions of eyeballs, and Facebook is an untapped marketing resource. Only a handful of Internet wise guys know how to use it. Here are some tips.

Facebook, Inc., runs a leading social networking web site, Facebook.com. Initially launched by undergraduates at Harvard University for college students, the site was soon expanded to include alumni in the corporate world as well as high school students. Membership was opened to anyone with a valid e-mail address in 2006 and it has grown into the millions since.

The key to marketing on Facebook is this: A members full profile information is available only to other members who are somehow connected. The resulting "connections" is what makes Facebook a billion-dollar idea that offers fat bank accounts to marketers who know how to be one of "them".

A news feed feature, controversial at first, allows sponsors to push ads to highly targeted audiences in ways never before imagined. The value of these online connections that imitate those in real life is also reflected in classified advertising and that is where marketing is done, for free, among those connected "friends".

Forget about trying to spam the system. Friends tell their friends about spammers and global searches of all registered users are not possible, limiting the possibilities for SPAM and other abuses.

Facebook has features to stay relevant in the Web 2.0 world. It leads the generation of interactive web sites designed to make it easy for users to share video, music, and other multimedia content. And, for marketers to reach those people in this sharing model.

Facebook ranked as the sixth or seventh largest social networking site. It was on top in some key metrics, according to ComScore Media Metrix statistics quoted in Fast Company. It led the country in photo sharing, a capability at the heart of the Web 2.0 challenge. In 2007 the company signed up with Comcast to produce a webcast called the "Facebook Diaries," based on video contributed by users. Opening membership to the general public swelled the membership rolls and shifted the demographics away from the college age crowd. Interestingly, more than one-quarter of users were outside the United States.

Some marketers saw this shift to an older, more affluent, user base and moved in to make Facebook a steady source of steady income.

Some of the site features these marketers are using include:

........ The Wall

The Wall is a space on each user's profile page that allows friends to post messages for the user to see. One user's wall is visible to anyone with the ability to see their full profile, and different users' wall posts show up in an individual's News Feed. Many marketers use their friend's walls for leaving short, temporal notes. More private discourse is saved for Messages, which are sent to a person's Inbox, and are visible only to the sender and recipient(s) of the Message, much like email.

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