I Am Blogie

Have you noticed the growing number of Filipino companies advertising on Facebook lately? This trend points to two things: 1) the population of Filipino users in Facebook has reached critical mass already; and, 2) businesses in the Philippines are finally grasping the reality behind ‘new media’ and the benefits of online advertising and marketing.

Facebook reports that the site now has upwards of 140 million active users, and that 70% of that is outside the U.S. (I would certainly love to find out the numbers from the Philippines!) And an even more significant demographic that will surely attract advertisers: the fastest growing segment of this population are 25 years old and older.

More statistics to whet an advertiser’s appetite:

• the average user has about 100 friends on Facebook
• worldwide, 2.6 billion minutes are spent on the site everyday
• more than 13 million users login at least once a day (and this probably doesn’t count access from mobile devices)
• 700 million+ photos are uploaded each month
• 15 million+ pieces of content are shared each month

What’s more, Facebook has made it tremendously accessible to publish ads on their site. There’s an easy-to-follow Web form that advertisers can use to create an ad, define its behavior (when to publish, duration and so forth), input the landing site address, and most significantly, set the desired target demographics.

This is something that’s not entirely possible — and is in fact quite hit-and-miss — with advertising on newspapers, TV or radio. On Facebook (and Google for that matter), advertisers can specify which age group, for instance, will be the target viewers of their ads with a certain degree of accuracy. Would you like only married women who are between 21 to 35 years old and are living in Metro Manila to see your ad? Consider it done.

As the number of ad placements from the Philippines rises on Facebook, Google properties, the vast number of Filipino blogs and other websites, conversely, advertising in traditional media seems to be experiencing a gradual decline. The pinch isn’t yet as painful as it is in the U.S. (as reported by TechCrunch as early as last year), but the downhill trend will start to become apparent here in the next couple of years.

As the venerable typewriter has largely been supplanted by the PC, so will the old forms of media become a thing of the past — maybe even during our lifetime. The age of electronic media is firmly upon us, and more people will soon be shifting to the Internet as their primary source of information.