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Callan Green has just published a great post on Mashable about brands who are really getting it right in Facebook Fan Pages. To make the most of Facebook Fan pages (or Bebo, any other social network), you need to actively engage with your fans. Phillips, herself a mother of ‘millennials’ – roughly defined as those who were pre-teen at the turn of the century - quotes her own research into how young adults view brands who attempt to ‘befriend’ them Sure, she says, “anyone can build a fan page in under 10 minutes, and some big brands may even attract fans without any real effort.

Back in June 2007 I wrote a popular tutorial on writing Facebook platform applications with Ruby On Rails . Time has moved on since and Facebook has launched Facebook Connect which allows you to integrate Facebook into your own sites allowing authentication, registration, friend connecting, and Facebook feed posting in the context of your application. Mashable has a great post on 10 great implementations of Facebook Connect including Joost At Made By Many we are fans of the possibilites of Facebook Connect for lowering barriers of registration, extracting social graph and injecting your social media functions into the daily online life of users.

However, in this article I discuss the use of Facebook for building your list. On Facebook , friends, page fans and followers of various applications, such as NetworkedBlogs , all belong to your list, and all receive communications from you in one form or another. If Facebook would enable you to have an unlimited number of friends, you could probably get along without fans and followers. I have already written List Building Using Ning Social Networks and List Building Using Twitter . I

Here’s speculation by The Business Insider on Facebook’s revenue streams: Earlier this week (July 2nd 2009) we spoke to several sources who each have some insight into Facebook’s financials (none of them know precisely). 150 million from Facebook’s ad deal with Microsoft $75 Social media monetization is a funny thing – most people don’t understand that where there are people, there is money. It is highly improbable that the day will come when millions of people together will not mean money.

Well, the number of Australians on Facebook has shot through the roof. If you hunt through this blog, you’ll notice that I’ve been tracking Facebook users in Australia since May 2007 (around 200,000 members I think) to today and 1/3 of Australian population. Here’s the description of a Monthly Active Use r according to Facebook, as well as the August figures for Australians on Facebook. After sitting on 6 million for a while, we have 7,900,000 monthly active users, 6,900,000 over 18 years old. That’s quite a jump.

It just takes time for the older generation to find out where the photos are being uploaded, lives being discussed, and they want in. Women over 55 take Facebook by storm The number of US women over age 55 using Facebook grew by 175.3% since September 2008, making mature females one of the fastest growing demographic groups on the social network, according to usage statistics released Wherever the grandkids are, the grandparents follow. This is not a-typical.

Research released by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) in the UK suggests that people are growing increasingly tired of requests to join brand pages or install brand applications in Facebook and other social networks . Rather than a brand trying to engage people separately in Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and every other social network and forum site, it is better to use these as gateways to somewhere else. The research found that almost two in every three of the 2,000 respondents to the survey were fed up with the constant requests to join groups and try new applications.

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The biggest group on Facebook are not university or college students, or even people in their 20s in their first job. According to analysis by iStrategyLabs , the biggest group of users on Facebook are 35-54 year olds. Their study of figures for the US that are publicly available to advertisers shows that over 28% of Facebook users are in this age-range, with a further 12% of users aged 55 or over. Image via Wikipedia In fact the 55+ age-group is the one that has seen the largest growth in the six month to July 2009 – an impressive 514% increase in users.