5 Amazing Benefits of Facebook

About a week ago, I embarked on a new social experiment to explore the limits of what I could really do with Facebook. Six days in, I’ve liked over three hundred pages and interacted with almost all of them to discover five things I never knew.

1. Brands Care About Early Adopters (A Lot) – Upon interacting with a number of pages for everything from hotels to speakers to detergent and more, I’ve discovered that a lot of the people on the other end of a company’s social media presence have explicit instructions to seek out and interact with people who might be considered early adopters of their upcoming products. In just a week of comments and likes, I’ve made my way on to lists to try everything from new laundry detergents to restaurants and even been sent tickets to a number of brand-centric events around the globe.

2. Distributed Learning Is Far Better Than Any Alternative – By following everyone from McKinsey and Bain & Co. to publications like The Economist and Fast Company, I’ve discovered the value of having other people learn things for me and then teach them to me within the confines of a perpetually updating newsfeed. I used to spend hours of my day sifting through RSS feeds and visiting web site after website after web site to keep up. Having an army of people to take over that task has freed me from my endless searching and left me with more time to actually learn.

3. Social Customer Service > 1-800 Numbers – If you pose a question or issue on a company’s Facebook page, you’ll get a better response in about half the time. Every second that they don’t deal with an issue is another second for their thousands of fans to notice that the company has poor customer service. By putting your problem in front of an audience, the company now has a million people to please instead of just one.

4. Everyone Is On Facebook – It sounds obvious, but the past week has really put 500 million people in perspective for me. Through connections to a variety of global brands with the like button as a proxy, I’ve had people from high levels of governments, scientists, fashion designers, artists, and students introduce themselves to me and engage in conversations about nearly any topic I can imagine. Beyond your own network, there are millions of people that can potentially connect with you and there’s virtually no chance that you’d have been able to meet any of them even as recently as five years ago.

5. Facebook Really Cares About Its Users – One of my more interesting discoveries so far has been how much time, effort, and research Facebook puts into improving its users’ experiences with its service. The company maintains a growing number of pages to address security, marketing, design and almost anything else you can think of. It’s refreshing to see a brand that’s intrinsically social in nature harness its own creation to interact with people from all over the globe.

I can’t wait to see what I learn next. One week down, fifty-one to go.

• By Patrick Widen

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About The Author

Patrick Widen

Patrick began his career in design at the age of twelve, later starting his design firm, Foozoo Design, while still a senior in high school. In the rebellious years of his youth, he virtually ignored his high school curriculum in favor of pursuing his own academic career in marketing, psychology, and design. 400 books, three companies, and a cocktail of interesting experiences later he opened the doors of Blend to help companies dive into design and create products, services, and experiences that make people smile. When he's not working, Patrick is also student at Vanderbilt where he is exploring the connections between neuroscience, design, marketing, and economics. It is his hope that through these connections he will soon begin to find the answers to the questions that he believes will change the world for the better and make each and every inch of it a better place for the people that live there.