At the CMA – Canadian Marketing Association – Digital Marketing Conference today and Mike Murphy – Vice-President Media Sales – for Facebook just finished his keynote address, The Power Of Social Media For Brands. He dropped some Facebook statistics that dropped some jaws (including mine).

1. The average Facebook user spends about twenty-one minutes plus per day at the online social network.
2. The average Facebook user visits four times per day.
3. Facebook is adding about three hundred and fifty thousand new users every day.
4. Just this morning Facebook surpassed fifty million worldwide community members.
5. Facebook’s size doubles every six months.

Interestingly, Canada does a little better for Facebook. The average Canadian Facebook user spends over thirty minutes on the site per day.

What also intrigued me was that sixty-five percent of Facebook users return the next day. As Murphy says, "that’s a sticky site."

Murphy also gave three things all Marketers must be aware when trying to to bring their brands into Facebook:

1. Be a part of the experience. Advertising in Facebook is effective, but integrating your brand and making it exciting for the Consumers is where Marketers are having the most success.
2. Maintain a daily dialogue. Nothing new to those who live and breathe Social Media. Conversations don’t happen when only one side is talking.
3. Give them a reason to share. This is a big one. A lot of time Marketers are trying to define how they will join the conversation. Murphy suggested something very similar to what I preach. It is important for companies to understand social media and the power of the channel, but one of the most effective things a Marketer can do is empower their consumers (and Brand Evangelists) to connect to one another by giving them stuff they can really use – and stuff they really want.

I was also reading the November 2007 issue of Wired Magazine on the flight over and caught an article called, Iconoclast – The mother of all Happy Macs gives the gifts of Web 2.0. It’s all abut Susan Kare – the person who was hired by Apple in 1983 to design the look and feel of the Macintosh interface. Her work included the development of the icons we’ve all come to know and use. Kare is now one of the people developing the gifts that you can buy and send to friends in Facebook. The price is usually about one dollar and they are limited editions. While the profile of Kare was fascinating, here’s what really took me by surprise:

"Launched last February, the site’s gift shop offers icons for every occasion, from balloons, puppies and champagne to mojitos, handcuffs, boom boxes, and a can labeled Whoop Ass. To date, users have exchanged more than 20 million virtual gifts, paying up to $1 for each, making them one of the site’s most successful revenue stream."

So, Facebook is not just a sticky Website… there’s a business model behind it. No matter how simple it may seem to us.