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Companies now had a large base of users signed up as ‘fans’ to their products and services. It meant that they could communicate with their followers directly, using a medium which their fans used daily. They could get into the minds of their supporters by placing strategic messages in their Facebook status and have it beamed across to their home pages, however there was a catch.

For a Facebook status to become successful, it needs to have a certain amount of interest generated by the fans themselves. This means that they need to do one of two things in order to promote their messages – either ‘comment’ on the status or click the ‘like’ button (which is similar to a ‘ding’ or vote up button). So how could companies make sure that people did this? The answer was in humour.

The funny Facebook status was born, and with it a whole slew of marketing officials whose job it was to create a message which people would react to and click. When they commented on this marketing material, it in a sense went viral and quickly spread across the network and subsequently across the internet. It was a big discovery for companies, and one which would lead them to invest more and more time and money in Facebook.

Funny Facebook statuses

The types of Facebook status update that were being created also changed overnight. No longer would people be telling the world all of the boring facts about their mundane daily lives – no more ‘I’m eating pizza’ or ‘John is going to the toilet again’ – it became a breeding ground for jokes, humour and witty quotes from famous people. It had turned into a legitimate micro blogging platform, and the same people who had left Facebook for Twitter just months earlier began to see the benefits of getting their messages on Facebook instead.

Twitter has many advantages, such as huge user base and a focus on their core product, but Facebook had so much more to offer its users and it had grown organically, from friend to friend. This ‘trust’ factor was very important for its future if it wanted to stay as the number one social network.

Funny Facebook status marketing tool

Soon after Facebook introduced Fan pages, the internet world realized how powerful the world’s largest social networking site was going to become. Myspace had been using these sort of ‘fan pages’ for a while, mainly to promote bands, but Facebook was going to go one better (as usual), and opened up its doors to brands and celebrities to get their own fan pages working for them. It was a raging success. People signed up in their thousands to have their own page on Facebook (as opposed to being just a user), and these fan pages had more control over exactly what they showed to the public, and how they shared their data.

This had an immediate effect on the Facebook status update, as suddenly celebrities could post to their fanpage and their message would be pushed out to the home feeds of their fans. It meant that instead of having to send emails and updates to fans, these marketers could simply insert a little message into their home feed. This is known as passive marketing, and it made people feel in touch with their idols. It also gave those idols the opportunity to become more of a brand associated with Facebook, the world’s most successful (at that time) website.

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For more info, read on later about how you can take control of your own Facebook status and turn it into a money maker!

Funny Facebook statuses – Their history

One of the things which kept Facebook apart from its rivals (like Myspace, Hi5 and Friendster) was the appearance and usage of status update messages. These lines were featured on people’s home pages or profile pages, and they would describe exactly what someone is doing or thinking at any one time. You could change this status update as many times as you want, and it began a new trend of ‘social micro blogging’. It was something which would then be harnessed by the likes of Twitter, who built an entire empire around the concept of leaving small messages for people to read and comment on. ——- This is part one of a brief history of Facebook and its status update system. Check the blog again for more info about where the funny Facebook status was born and how it came to be an important part of the marketing mix today!

One small issue remained, however. The format of theFacebook status was such that people had to write in the following format:

User is XXXXX.

Where XXXXX stands for the activity or verb which they wanted to highlight. What’s the problem? Well, it meant that people had to use very strange phrases in order to get their messages across. It also meant that people had to talk in the ‘third person’, which meant that they often sounded quite annoying and egotistical. Twitter, on the other hand, was not using this style and just had a simple empty box for people to write in. The result was that Twitter’s popularity grew and Facebook had to rely on its other core products (such as photo sharing and their longer ‘notes’) to stay ahead of the competition.

Funny Facebook statuses

Then, with a ‘revamp’ of their site, Facebook took the bold step of removing the necessity to write in third person and, even more importantly, took away the ‘name’ at the beginning of the box. The Facebook status went from amusing sidebar to one of the most powerful social media messengers out there. The popularity grew overnight, as suddenly people could put funny Facebook statuses in their home feed and they would be ‘pushed’ out to all of their friends.