Posted on October 28, 2009

A Facebook Fan Page is one perfect example of one of these new marketing vehicles available for a business to utilize. After a recent redesign, these pages are now very similar to standard user profile pages in looks as well as functionality. These pages include a Wall tab that publishes your news feed as well as user comment posts, an Info tab that is populated with nibbles of your company’s information, a self-explanatory Photos tab, and several other default tabs. Additionally, you can add your own custom set of application tabs, some of which are completely customizable.

If your business doesn’t have a Fan Page yet, you better be asking yourself why you don't. These specialized Facebook pages offer a gaggle of benefits that would turn any entrepreneur, large business, or corporation's head:

1. Community Building: The Fan Page is a great platform for your loyal followers to come together for your product or service by utilizing the Wall feature or other available modular applications. Users can submit text testimonials, post pictures, create and upload video, hold discussions with each other – all supporting the growth of your online community.

2. Search Engine Optimization: As discussed in one of our previous posts, the benefits of creating a Fan Page also give you more footing in search ranking. By publishing backlinks to your business’ pages as well as having a Facebook Fan Page with your name in the title, your business will be receiving some big bonus points in the SEO department.

3. Insights: Facebook Fan Pages are nicely equipped with a good amount of analytics tools accessible by page owners. You’ll be able to track the number of interactions your page has with fans, view key demographics like sex, age, and location, and more.

4. Communication: You have a variety of customization options when choosing to communicate with your fan base. You can send an update that appears as notifications on homepages, and you can target your message to match a specific age, gender, and location. Don’t forget – since you can publish to the “stream”, you’re able to communicate messages and posts directly into your fans’ homepages.

5. Price: Did I forget to mention that it’s completely free? All of these previous benefits are available for the low, low cost of zero dollars. You could have one up and running in just a smidge of time. 

If you're like me and are more of a visual learner, check out some examples of great Fan Pages on Facebook: Red Bull, Mountain Dew, and McDonalds.

Posted on October 28, 2009

The rise in popularity of the soon-to-be number 1 social network site Facebook is due to a combination of two things.

1. Formerly a hangout only for high school and college students, Facebook allowed anyone to join in September, 2006.

2. In May, 2007 Facebook opened up it’s network to developers.

By opening up it’s network to developers Facebook has provided a way to make money right on the Facebook web site. Something you can’t do on MySpace. The only way to make money off of MySpace is by attracting users to another web site outside the MySpace community and making money on that site.

Below is an Alexa traffic comparison of the top two social network sites. Bold prediction: It won’t be long before Facebook becomes more popular than MySpace.

Facebook: a developer magnet

Since opening up it’s network to developers Facebook has seen a flood of new applications created. In fact, over 1000 developers are signing up every day.

Addonomics, an open analytics platform that tracks Facebook application growth and provides stock-market-style analysis of Facebook features says that as of today…

• There are 342,015,965 installs across 5,118 apps on Facebook.
• These applications were used 23,360,190 times in the last 24 hours and have a combined valuation of $249,800,000.
• Facebook has approximately 40 million Unique Active Users in the past 30 days and a valuation between $10Bn and $15Bn.
• This translates to between $250 and $375 per active user.

7 ways to make money with Facebook

In The Facebook Economy Business 2.0 outlined a few ways application developers are making money off of Facebook.

1. Selling advertising space
Facebook apps with large audiences can make a lot of money selling ad space on their page through ad networks like Lookery, Userplane and Google Adsense.

2. Sponsorship
Advertisers are lining up to sponsor popular Facebook applications. The Food Fight! application which lets you throw virtual food at your friends is soon to be serving up virtual chicken wings from a major food chain. Tyson???

3. Sell goods and services
The future of Facebook applications is utility, not fun. Facebook application Band Tracker searches upcoming concerts and links to ticket vendor web sites. Soon, it will be common for people to make purchases from their own Facebook pages.

Lee Lorenzen, CEO of Altura Ventures provided us with the following four ways to make money with Facebook.

4. Write a Facebook book
I’ve heard about a number in the works and that means advances/royalties for authors.

5. Write a Facebook blog
There are already a number of good ones beginning to cover the Facebook eco-system but there is room for more. Once you have an audience for your blog you can start selling ads and sponsorships.

6. Develop Facebook apps as a consultant
Good / great Facebook developers are in very limited supply and so the demand is high. I’ve heard of hourly rates in the $200 per hour range for folks who can architect, write and deploy viral Facebook apps.

7. Sell your Facebook app
If you can create an app on Facebook, get it to 10K to 100K users, harvest some ad revenue from it by partnering with AdBrite for CPM/CPC ads, offer Cost Per Install ads via Adonomics and you provide data to get an Adonomics certified valuation, then you will be in a position to get top dollar for your application should you decide to sell it.

At the moment, the big winners of the Facebook jackpot are application developers. The big losers might be other social networks like MySpace, if they fail to open up their networks.

Posted on October 28, 2009

1. Branding - Facebook can be a great resource for generating brand awareness. Facebook is becoming popular amongst various age demographics and can be a create interception point for building your relationship with you consumers and prospects.
2. Customer Engagement - Using Facebook applications can be a great way for communicating promotions, contest and events. Again it is another interception point that can be leveraged to entice consumer engagement with your brand, your products or your service.
3. Drive Web Traffic - Facebook can act as a portal point for driving traffic to your site and other online properties.
4. Reputation Management - can be a useful tool for seeing what users are saying about you and your brand. In addition your Facebook profile can now be indexed in the search results and as a result can provide another favorable listing in the organic search results of the engines.
5. New Customer Acquisition - Facebook provides an opportunity to find consumers you may have not otherwise discovered.
6. Lead Generation - Similar to the previous point is that Facebook can act as another potential lead gen tool that can be used to qualify leads. Reviewing potential prospects' profiles may help you build a relationship with your prospects and aid in the lead generation qualifying process.
7. Client Retention - provides another potential interception point to build the relationship with your consumer.
8. Access to the social world and it’s inherent value - aka the cool factor. You never know who is using Facebook. Consider the following scenario: a potential prospect could be doing research on your brand or organization and may use Facebook to see if you have a presence there. Then they see that you have a Facebook profile and see a number of positive posts about your brand. This in turn can shape their sphere of influence and could end up being one of many deciding factors as to why the prospect selects you over another vendor. The perception that Facebook is "IN" and the fact that you are using Facebook could help influence their perception of your brand. Having said that, there are still may who are anti-Facebook so it could also affect the perception about your brand. The fact remains is that Facebook continues to gain popularity and it is not going away anytime soon.
9. The Viral Effect - Take word Of mouth to a whole new level. Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd... Facebook is attracting quite a crowd.
10. Feedback Mechanism - Using Facebook and the various applications available can help you understand consumer behavior based on the sharing of content and commentary on the social networking site.
11. Build Business Use Cases - Facebook can provide you with an opportunity to build successful business cases as you target specific vertical markets with specific business objectives.

There have been other social networks and media sites that have had limited success in terms of promotion and creating brand awareness. With the amount of existing and new applications that are being created on Facebook, business owners have an opportunity to use Facebook to promote their brand even further. The above points illustrate that there is benefit for organizations who use Facebook. It may not be the tool or medium that many would first think of to promote their brand, but judging by the surging popularity, Facebook is not that bad of a place to create awareness of your brand.