Did facebook do any marketing at the beginning?

actually when FB opened up to 'networks' of highschools and colleges they spread via 'forced' word of mouth on myspace. Many users (including myself) would get a message from a hacked account saying something like "your friends account was hacked, our constantly being spammed. Dont you want privacy and control?"

that is a big paraphrase since I dont recall the exact message, but they continued spamming for about 5-6 months until their site was growing real fast.

 

so FB hacked myspace accounts and used them to promote thier site?
Didn't the invite your friends thing make a big diffrence for them?

 

i dont think they hacked accounts. i think they purchased comments.. in fact im not really sure, but I liked their site and the simplicity of it (the fully customized pages on myspace invite trouble).

so i stayed.

 

Man any site can be popular as myspace facebook

It needs National Television attension And PRESS AND PRINT AND MEDIA attension

Tomorrow create a dating site for your local city country. Keep some hot profile.. make it a bit different (nothing just a new script with some new features)

Then Broadcast Advertisement on Your National TV. Shadi.com Where date becomes life partner
Then broadcast ADvertisement BIG FRONTPAGE COLOR AD on newspaper with high profile model. saying i find my mate on shadi.com and you/?

Then just sit back and watch your site visitors. atleast 700 000 ppl from your city/country (depending if you have internet and computers strong there) will join your site.. and start to promote it or brag about it in 100 000 forums..

Internet marketing never can work to make a site as big as google myspace facebook ebay cnn bbc etc

Internet marketing can only work for few 1000 or 100000 visitors per day and mostly close button and gone visitors (much like popunders popup visitors)

Stumble digg seo forum traffic.. no matter how hard you try.. they are all jerking visitors.. coming checking and closing.. and gone..

Its the press media and tv that makes a site super populer and takes to A MILLION DOLLAR WORTH SITE

Like MTV.COm

Unless you have advertising budget of 50K USD. And have connection with USA CANADA UK AUS media advertising agencies..

You cannot take internet as business

Only think you can do is clone popular sites.. and do directory submission link building seo forum promotion or gamble on ppc.. and bring some tiny amounts like $200 per day profit or $-200 per day loss of time and money.

Internet is real business
But internet Marketing is 100% scam. It dont work unless you recruit 10 000 affiliates who work day night on their buts to bring few $100 sales or 100 paid members to your site..

Never ever buy ebooks how to get top in google or get 30k backlinks or some cheesy methods to get traffic blackhat or youtube or amazon or comment spamming methods

These things dont sustain.. and just like 0.001cent worth visitors like you buy from Adbrite full page ad

Even if sustain then very small profit for shorter amount of time and not enough to make a living .

Imagine a Waiter in UK gets Pound 1500 and a java programmer in USA gets $6000. you make peanuts for your time with blog spamming forum pushing link building directory submission etc etc etc ALL JUNK methods

In short INTERNET MARKETING IS 100% SCAM . And those ppl who sale WSO in warrior forum or EBOOKS saying it making them 30k MONTH.. just pushing the link to few 1000 places.. are the biggest scammers. Cause if they making 30k month pushing 1 site to few 1000 places.. they wont bother to write an ebook for a buy me a beer fee..

Other then that GOOGLE ADWORD AND PPC marketing is 100% gamble and as good 30 second visitors.. come checked liked or disliked and gone.. Some ppl are smart and lucky to gamble in a smarter way.. like using Vouchers or using content network for cheapest price lower then 3cent traffic and throwing it on dating cpa or ringtone offers. But honestly this is same as torrent traffic and have no real value. And most of this dating or ringtone signups never upgrade as paid. And the affiliate may get punished for low conversion traffic and earning might cut down in the long run..

 

Come visit close and gone.. Just like you read my post.. and Say damm what a shit post.. click back button and move on.. imagine there is signature link in my post and in dragons5 post but hardly anyone will click it.. even click it.. just see it and close it.. Oh its that type of site.. i see.. design isnt that good.. ahh stop waiste time.. lets see another

 

I think most social networking websites are word of mouth.

 

Facebook got US$12.7 MILLION from Accel when they started. Accel had ties with CIA - the funds were used to promote te site, attract as many people as possible so they can be spied on. Any social networking site would become huge very fast having multi million dollar funding from the CIA.

Read more --> Facebook by the CIA

Facebook was not spread via word of mouth, The had millions of dollars and made good use of it. They collect all private information about you, and you gave them permission to do that when you signed up. It only proves how worthless all people who use facebook are. They even believe it's the sincere social network. Very laughable...

 

I sign you on that one, muncle. That is the main reason why i haven't created a facebook profile. And i wont be giving any private information if i register a profile over there in the future.

But yes, i think the most effective process of marketing facebook was to appeal to college and university students in the beginning.

 

When Facebook first started up it was only for college students and you had to be invited by a member. They were exclusive with members so they used word-of-mouth to get people to sign up.

 

how do these invertments work? Did accel come to FB and say hey, we wanna invest $12M in FB? and what if the site is not a success and fails? How is FB going to pay Accel back?

 

LOL at you who said facebook only depends on words of mouth. Obviously Mark Zuckerberg didn't launch facebook to public soon after he got a big success in his college (earlier facebook was only for harvard students if I remember). He met Sean Parker, etc. then they received fundings from investors. They were advertising. I think you should read wikipedia or techcrunch for more info about facebook's funding.

You are right about this point, that's why I make big money BUT i never sold my tactic to anyone

 

No, it was more like this:

Look, we're gonna give you $12.5 million so you can get as many people on the site as possible. In exchange, this is what we want to know about those people.........

 

I Think it started with advertising and then when a user signs u he sends a invite too all his contact list through facebok which keeps on multiplying

 

Yup, I agreed. I've also heard that Facebook is one of the most popular social networking site.

 

Zuckerberg admits to the court that he didn't come up with the idea for facebook, but rather that he was filling a generally recognized need - http://www.02138mag.com/asset/1136.html

The guy got lucky. Really lucky. I hate to see him lauded as such a business genius because, frankly, it just doesn't seem like he is.

 

one of the greatest things they did marketing wise at the beginning was only allow people with edu addresses in. This way when they opened it later to anyone people instantly wanted in. Its sort of being allowed into a private club you couldnt get into before. I would call this psychological marketing.

 

.edu wasn't a marketing tactic. They solved a real problem that existed for a group of people with email accounts that looked like *@*.harvard.edu. They then extended it to *@mit.edu, etc as demand for the product reached these new schools.

It did have the effect of it feeling cluby. But so much of what you all are saying was "marketing tactics" and "strategy" was luck.

If you want to replicate facebook's early success, here is an easy formula:
1) solve a real, recognized problem for a discrete group of people.
2) get really lucky and have other people say "hey, i have that problem too"

Aside from that I think they did two things early on that were brilliant:
1) they kept the site clean. It's the whole theory of elegant design from laziness + don't annoy your users.
2) They had a rotating bar at the bottom of every page that said "the next step" - early on the only thing you could do was "invite a friend" and a lot of people did.

But hey, i've only been a user since the ids were 4 digits so what do I know.

 

I think the CIA owns it so it's not too hard for them to get the word around when they want to.

 

CIA owns and controls FaceBook. Any site with unlimited resources of CIA would become big without any excessively massive effort.

 

In the beginning he got a list of everyone's name and email in Harvard and then spammed it with his little site.