Why Facebook offers opportunities to brands

Until recently, Facebook was a confusing network for brands. A vast number of people including companies and marketers weren’t sure what the platform was all about, or the difference between a page, sometimes called public profile or a group. Fortunately, Facebook’s recent changes to make pages seem more like public profiles by granting them the same look and feel, have made very clear this is the place where brands should be.

What you need to understand as a marketer is that apart from your property website, there’s an entire audience you can easily tap into that can generate additional traffic to your site.

What we recommend to marketers is that they shift some of their brand activities and interactions from their website to Facebook Pages. We wouldn’t want all efforts and activities to evolve, grow and take place in only one site when you can actually have the opportunity to increase your visibility and generate more traffic through networks such as this one. It goes well beyond just posting up new information and updating your website with content, it should also implicate sharing, interacting and engaging on two-way conversations in an attempt to come a step closer to consumers.

One great advantage Facebook offers to brands is that it is a great word of mouth marketing tool. How many times have you seen one of your friends become a fan of something/someone or add an application and shortly after see it published in the News Feeds? And let’s be honest, it’s inevitable not to be curious about what your friends are up to, the activities they’re involved in and even more inevitable, not to follow along.

This is the beauty of viral. It’s those messages on the News Feed that can be so powerful and instrumental for branding without the need to spend one cent, all thanks to the combination of viral and peer-to-peer word of mouth.

Can you imagine all the things you can do using the Facebook News Feed? All your interactions can be multiplied and triplified giving them maximum exposure and reach within your network and beyond.

Many brands, as we know, are already benefiting from this social platform and taking advantage of its potential. With over 200 million users, Facebook has really proven to be a powerful way to reach consumers specially as it is now becoming part of many people’s daily activities, hence it’s conveniency. Michael Donnelly, director, worldwide interactive marketing at The Coca-Cola Company says:

“Many consumers are already sharing information regularly on Facebook-this is just one more way to quickly share information in a place where they are already spending time.”

And one easy and useful way to integrate a brand’s actions and activities into Facebook’s News Feeds is using Facebook Connect, which we know is the API that has deep integration points for brands. Installation is very simple and it’s a great way to bring the two sites together on many different levels of interaction, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence in a very short period of time.

To know more about Facebook Connect, please refer to our previous post.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 8th, 2009 at 5:31 pm and is filed under Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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