Marketing to Generation facebook

A new article posted yesterday by Fortune Small Business has some good points for businesses that are still struggling with the question ‘do I build a website?.’

The stats:

• 158,209,426 active websites according to a netcraft.com survey
• 102,678,031 active domains.
• 809,000 active SLL certificates used in shopping carts data source

Three quarter of all businesses in the USA are sole proprietorships. However, sole proprietor businesses, with no payroll account for only 3.4% of all receipts. The total number of businesses in the USA is approximately 26 million. Suffice to say, most businesses are still not on the Internet, according to small business census numbers.

It has been predicted that US online shoppers will double to 132 million in the next five years

• $211 billion: projected 2006 online sales, including travel, from Forrester Research study
• 50 Percent of consumers 18-34 years old in Consumer Reports that they will do their shopping online 2005
• The average online spend among UK internet users Christmas 2006 was an estimated £237 with 70% of UK internet users buying online
• Canadians Are Poised To Double Their Online Spending For Retail Goods from $8 Billion This Year to $16 Billion by 2009 - Canada B2C E-Commerce

These numbers only account for three countries. The message is, if your business is not on the net then it is losing money. The net is an economic frontier that is seeing the largest growth in its consumer base than any market in the world.

This growing consumer base is being fed by Asia, Europe, and the teens that grew up with text messaging, RPGs, and facebook. The media generation is already changing the way we do business. Already catch phrases such as corporate transparency are forcing businesses to be as revealing online as this generation is willing to be. Don’t ‘tell all’ or show everything possible on the blog, and no one will read it. Don’t blog – they won’t buy. It is a simple theory.

Some businesses are already stepping up to the plate. Text that converts to audio, then downloads on an iPod is more valuable than 10 000 pages of content. Media will become the new ‘king’. And if Google takes control of their PC browsers to control spending and searches – they are tech savvy enough to hack Google’s toolbar.

This will control how webmasters build the next generation of business websites. There is one thing the webmasters already know about the facebook generation. Ignore them when building a website and they will ignore you when it is time to buy.