Should your business become active in Facebook?

Should your business become active in Facebook?

To help you make an informed decision about your company’s Facebook strategy, Hubspot compiled these fantastic Facebook business stats.

1. 93% of adult US Internet users are on Facebook. (source: BlogHer, April 2011)
2. One out of every eight minutes online is spent on Facebook. (source: ComScore, February 2011)
3. The average Facebook user spends more than 11 hours per month on Facebook. (sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics, June 2010 & Facebook Press Room, 2011)
4. Facebook is overtaking Google and Yahoo in total time spent online. (source: ComScore, August 2011)
5. Facebook has become the top choice for social sign-in. (source: Janrain, April 2011)
6. Facebook has become the preferred way to share content online, second only to email—for now. (source: Chadwick Martin Bailey, September 2010)
7. The average number of “likes” per post on a brand’s Facebook page is 54. The average number of comments per post is 9. (source: Visibli, April 2011)
8. More than half of B2B marketers agree that Facebook is an effective marketing tool. (source: Outsell, December 2009)
9. More than half of small businesses agree that Facebook is beneficial to their business. (source: Ad-ology, November 2010)
10. More than 1/3 of marketers say Facebook is “critical” or “important” to their business. (source: HubSpot State of Inbound Marketing Report 2011)
11. The number of marketers who say Facebook is critical or important to their business has increased 83% in two years. (source: HubSpot State of Inbound Marketing Report 2011)
12. 67% of B2C and 41% of B2B companies that use Facebook for marketing have acquired a customer through this channel. (source: HubSpot State of Inbound Marketing Report 2011)

Information provided by: Internet Marketing in a Box

The Reframing Matrix - Creativity tools from MindTools.com

The Reframing Matrix - Creativity tools from MindTools.com

A Reframing Matrix is a simple technique that helps you to look at business problems from a number of different viewpoints. It expands the range of creative solutions that you can generate.

Things look different when you change perspective.

© iStockphoto

The approach relies on the fact that different people with different experience approach problems in different ways. What this technique helps you to do is to put yourself into the minds of different people and imagine the solutions they would come up with.

We do this by putting the question to be asked in the middle of a grid. We use boxes around the grid for the different perspectives. This is just an easy way of laying the problem out, so if it does not suit you, change it.
We will look at two different approaches to the reframing matrix – you could, however, use this approach in many different ways.

The 4 Ps Approach

This relies on looking at a problem from different perspectives within a business. The 4 Ps approach looks at problems from the following viewpoints:

• Product perspective: Is there something wrong with the product?
• Planning perspective: Are our business plans or marketing plans at fault?
• Potential perspective: If we were to seriously increase our targets, how would we achieve these increases?
• People perspective: Why do people choose one product over another?

An example of this approach is shown below:

The 'Professions Approach'

Another approach to using a reframing matrix is to look at the problem from the viewpoints of different specialists. The way, for example, that a doctor looks at a problem would be different from the approach a civil engineer would use. This would be different from a sales manager's perspective.
The idea of the Reframing Matrix was devised by Michael Morgan in his book 'Creating Workforce Innovation '.