Check Out How TheFaceBook Pitched Advertisers Back When It Was Still a Tiny College Network #nostalgia
By Laura Entis
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
How's this for a trip down memory lane: Kevin Colleran, Facebook advertising salesperson No. 1, recently resurfaced his first advertising deck for the social network, which offers up a fascinating glimpse of the company before it was, well…the omnipresent powerhouse it is today.
I found my first Facebook advertising sales deck from April 2005. Crazy to see how far FB has come in 10 years! https://t.co/63x3XwCxZa
— Kevin Colleran (@KevinColleran) November 4, 2014Colleran's sales deck, which is focused on Starbucks, takes us back to early 2005, a quaint time before the era of Total Facebook Domination. The social network, which still went by TheFaceBook, had launched just one year earlier, and was reserved exclusively for college students. "TheFaceBook enables students to search for people at their school…look up friends of friends, network, and visualize their social network via photos," Colleran wrote, stressing the opportunity for brands to target "18-24 verified college students."
Related: Local Businesses: Facebook Now Offers Stalkerish Ads That Target Nearby Customers
Back then, Facebook's advertising options were nothing like the sophisticated tactics it employs today -- advertisers could choose from "traditional online banners, announcement (text only) ads, and custom groups designed to enable brands to create a following on-campus and interact with students daily." But there was one key point that would prove prophetic: Companies could, Colleran wrote, target users based on the information in their profiles, including relationship status, favorite books, movies and music, and major.
Another interesting nugget: At the time, Facebook had a 1.9 million monthly userbase (out of which an impressive 1.2 million logged on every day, proving that even in its infancy, Facebook was potently addictive) that primarily used the network to do things like "find students who share similar interests or courses." Less than a decade later, Facebook is an international behemoth that boasts 1.35 billion monthly active users and shapes the way a large swath of this country interacts with friends and family, as well as how we engage with the Internet at large.
"Crazy to see how far FB has come in the past 10 years!" Colleran tweeted.
If you consider the social network's current impact, crazy is an understatement.
Related: What's Missing From Your Facebook Ad Strategy
