Teams members of Toronto’s favourite social networking platform Facebook came up to Toronto for a Facebook Developer Garage, the first to ever be held outside of the United States. The event held at MaRS Centre in downtown Toronto, and organized by Andrew Cherwenka, Roy
Pereira and Colin Smillie. Over 400 people attended the event with and additional 30+ in an over-fill room. With the focus of the event sharing tips and tricks on how to develop applications for Facebook, the event attracted predominately a developer crowd, with a few advertising agencies, business consulting companies and I also had a chance to chat with some attendees who are either angel investors or looking businesses to fund.
The social networking site or platform as Platform Manager, Megan Marks (or Professor Megan Marks according to her Facebook profile) has become a tremendous opportunity for all type of companies across the Internet to leverage. She compared Facebook as a platform to that of Google Maps or Apple’s OS X Dashboard Widgets
The Viral Effect:
Megan shared that Facebook cares about (3) things, but if you really consider them on a different level they are also what has made the site so viral and draws 150,000 new users on a daily basis.
- Identify
- Information
- Social Contest
Stats on Facebook:
- 54+ million users
- 15 billion pageviews/month
- Toronto is the 2nd largest Facebook community in the world, with over 700,000 members
- over 2300 approved applications representing 100 million downloads
- 3.3 million active users in Canada ( log into Facebook more than once a month)
- 68% of the active users log in on a daily basis
- 8.5 billion pageviews a month from Canada
- 33 million active users in total
- 90,000 Facebook developers
New Opportunities with Facebook:
- Virtual Currency – applications where users can leverage self promotion, comparisons and incentive-based actions, an example application is such as Fluff Friends, which allows “you can adopt a cute pet on your Facebook profile!
- Ad networks – they are everywhere else on the web, so why not take advantage of Facebook, with the high user interaction companies are finding a high conversion rate and CPM’s of $15 – $20
- Api on top of their api – external sites that are using Facebook to drive traffic back to their site such as HotorNot, RockYou, and Slide have all seen large spikes in traffic after launching applications on Facebook
Of course with the recent industry changes in website measurement or death of page views, Facebook will have to working on a new method to track user engagement, which I did confirm they are in the process of working on.
