Facing up to Facebook: social media is adding a new dimension to marketing helping companies engage with customers.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: SOCIAL MEDIA [Facing up to Facebook]

Facebook is omnipresent, and seemingly on a trajectory toward omnipotent.

"The Social Network," the much-buzzed-about Facebook movie, just premiered at the New York Film Festival last month. Everybody and their mother seems to be on the website--literally.

Women in their 50s and 60s are the fastest-growing demographics on Face-book. But it's still largely about the youth market: Of the website's 500 million-plus users, a quarter are 18 to 24, and another quarter arc 25 to 34, meaning a full 250 million users are in that elusive sweet spot marketers are forever trying to reach.

Overall usage time jumped a staggering 700 percent from 2008 to 2009, according to Nielsen, and while it has slowed in 2010, Facebook now accounts for nearly 10 percent of the total time spent on the Internet--by everybody.

Such statistics have been known to make marketers drool. "You need to fish where the fish are," says Greg Williams, media director with Backbone Media in Carbondale. "Social media is now one of the essential elements of communicating with your customer. Facebook is essentially permission marketing--people are giving you permission to share your story with them."

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Backbone Media has gotten noticed for its work with Fort Collins' New Belgium Brewery, which cracked the 100,000-fan plateau on Facebook in August, just about two years after launching a social-media initiative. That represents a bigger audience than half of the print magazines in which New Belgium pays to advertise. Facebook is free but requires time and dedication. Social-media marketing requires more than just money, and that levels the playing field.

"We're never going to run ads during the Super Bowl, but we can kick Coors' ass on the social Web," Williams says.

New Belgium launched a "What's Your Folly?" campaign on Facebook last year with Backbone's help, inviting fans to share their folly, whatever that might be, in 350 words or less, and get a chance to win a cruiser bicycle every week for five weeks. The messages were pushed onto the fans' friends' pages, and each fan had nearly 200 friends on average. The results for the month: 7,000 follies shared turned into 10,000 new fans and 1 million impressions.

Then this February, New Belgium leaned heavily on Facebook in the launch of the brewery's new Ranger India Pale Ale, named for its sales representatives, a.k.a. Beer Rangers. Backbone helped develop a map divided into the Rangers' territories, and let the...