Using Facebook to Tap into the College Demographic

Considering the amount of time I spent geeking around on the Web in college, I’m astonished that I didn’t become a Facebook addict until just a month ago.

For those of you who don’t know - Facebook is a huge freakin’ deal in the college world. It’s a walled garden that requires a .edu e-mail address to get inside and set up a profile - which you then link to other people’s profiles in a vast friendship network. It’s a lot like MySpace, but it targets a very specific demographic - which makes it a great place to buy ad space.

But I’ve always thought that organizations had more to gain from Facebook than advertising. After all, most people my age have trained ourselves to block out a lot of it. Personally, I know that the best way to reach me as a consumer is through product placement - particularly when it comes to shoes.

But I digress. The point is that I can think of other ways for savvy business people to make use of Facebook without ticking off its users or spending tons of money:

• Use it as recruitment territory. It may be a little unconventional, and you’ll see sides of their personalities that you’ll never see in the workplace. But the fact is that Facebook is a huge bank of information about educated, web-savvy people about to step into the workforce.
• Find out who’s blogging. Facebook profiles give users the option of creating an outbound link to their website, which is a blog more often than not. This can be a great way to target influential bloggers within a geographic area, or even on a particular campus.
• Product Placement. If all else fails, find the people with the most Facebook friends and offer to pay them to promote your company’s product in their profile photo or photo albums. You can be very creative with this. It can be anything from asking them to use a photo of themselves drinking your company’s soda on their profile pic to giving them and their friends discounts at your Spring Break resort and asking them to document it in a photo album.

But remember how I said that Facebook is a walled garden that requires a .edu e-mail address? That could throw a monkey wrench in things, except that if you ever went to college, you likely have a .edu e-mail address. All you need to do is call up your alumni association and ask how to get it set up. Most likely, they’ll forward all your e-mails to another address so as not to take up space on their servers, but that’s all you need.