What you can measure you can manage

Facebook Flyers are the best way to reach audiences when and where they pay attention.

Promote your upcoming event, marketplace listing, or favorite candidate in the networks of your choosing, and target your Flyer at undergraduates, graduate students, alumni, or any combination of the three.

New! With Flyers Pro, only pay for the clicks you receive. Click here to try it out.

Wharton marketing professor David Bell says the long-term success of these sites will depend on their ability to retain the interest of their members. “There is a fad or a fashion component to all these networks. Some will come and go,” says Bell. The classic example, he suggests, is Friendster, which burst onto the Internet in 2003 and soon had 20 million visitors. Late last year, it slipped below a million after MySpace and other sites with better music and video capability lured Friendster users away. “A lot of the [success] is serendipitous. These things can have exponential growth. Then, if another community shows up that has better functionality in some way, there can be a mass migration.”

Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader agrees that social network sites are powerful, but mercurial, particularly since most are aimed at teenagers and young adults. “It’s a complete crap shoot. Look how many of these have come along and how many were touted as the next big thing. How many have disappeared completely or find themselves in some strange little unexplainable niche?”

The graph shows you your friends, the networks they belong to, and the social cliques they are part of. See who is central to a particular group and which friends are connectors between two groups.

The TouchGraph Facebook Browser shows your friends’ Profiles and Photos.
Click on friends in the graph to quickly flip through their pictures.