I attended the Facebook Strategy Lunch yesterday and found it to be extremely informative. I am looking forward to the next one.
If you want to be informed of any coming events, join the group titled Utah CEOs With A Facebook Strategy in Facebook.
The luncheon was hosted by Paul Allen and his team at FamilyLink.com including Jason McGowan and Mike Jensen, each of whom presented during the 1.5 hour meet. About 40 people attended.
Paul Allen was first up, and presented some very exciting insights into the Facebook opportunity. I felt like I was watching Rocky for the first time, and left even more excited about the future of Linking Universe. Among the highlights I gleaned from Paul’s presentation:
- Facebook is gaining momentum (currently out pacing all other social networks in growth);
- The Facebook Platform is the first social environment to go ‘open‘, which is spurring unprecedented growth (the development community is jumping on the Facebook coattails faster than you can say ‘new applications’);
- Social networking, and Facebook in particular, is more than a ‘fad’ (not only is it here to stay, but new applications are adding functions and features that make it evermore valuable. Consider Linking Universe, for instance…).
Jason McGowan took over and led us through some incredible stats. He forwarded his presentation to me after the event (thank you, Jason). Here are a handful of interesting highlights:
- Facebook has over 62 million active users;
- An active user is someone who logs in at least once each day;
- More than half of active users return again each day;
- Facebook has an average of 250,000 new registrations per day, a remarkably huge audience of new customers that effectively stave off a saturation point for any application;
- So far, the number of active users has doubled every six months;
- More than half of Facebook users are outside of college;
- The fastest growing age demographic in Facebook is 25 years and older;
- Facebook maintains a marketshare of 85 percent among U.S 4-year universities;
- More than 95 percent of Facebook users have added at least one application to their account, or about 60 million.
I was pleasantly surprised to learn that 34 percent of Facebook users are professionals, executives, and/or in sales, education, or technical fields. I quickly calculated the potential low-hanging-fruit for Linking Universe at over 20 million. Wow.
Jason wrapped up with a review of the Facebook interface and some tips about how to build applications more effectively, taking advantage of built-in features, and some marketing tips.
Mike Jensen spent some time discussing performance optimization and scalability. Among his advice:
- Go with Amazon’s EC2 platform;
- Plan ahead for scalability (he recalled the scaling nightmare they endured after going live and achieving overwhelming success);
- Loadbalancing techniques, memory optimization, and common practices regarding backups.
The meeting was informative, well informed, and well attended. The who’s who of our local Facebook community were in attendance, too, which made for a terrific networking opportunity.
Lunch was pretty good, too.
Our ‘Thanks‘ and appreciation go to the Utah CEOs With A Facebook Strategy for organizing a worthwhile event.
