Leverage Facebook for your web or blog

Jon Bond:

Marketing in the future is like sex. Only the losers will have to pay for it.

Last week I have attended an online conference on the topic of “How to drive more traffic to your web or blog” mady by Jose Maria Gil. He hit the issue of many fragmented platforms which offer marketing of your company for free. No matter if you are a newcomer bootstrapping your costs or a well established company – if you want to connect with your customers, you need to get to those platforms. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and blogs are going to be the essentials. The big paradox is having to spend less, but work more.

To share with you at least few insights from the conference, I would like to summarize some of the existing marketing opportunities that Facebook offers.

1. Starting from the landing page, this is the first touch point, that a company should take advantage of. Personalize it (Facebook allows you to use HTML), use the applications available, get inspired by others (check my article “Stop and shop in a one-stop-shop“, where I have been commenting on Facebook and included links for Starbucks and Coca Cola).
2. Coming to the wall page, get it properly linked to others social sites like Twitter or Facebook and iclude links to your web page to get better rating for your SEO and Google Adwords.
3. Moving to general information, don´t forget to mention all the links again.
4. Finishing with the events page, as for all the others, mention important links and use your key words while naming your events created.

Stop and shop in a one-stop-shop

Well, there´s nothing unexpected about this trend.

People want convenient lives.

Time is money.

In the same way as the popularity of huge commercial centers and hypermarkets grows, the popularity of online one-stop-shops grows. People don´t want to go from the bakery shop to the grocery one, then the dairy one and at the end to the butchery. People don´t want to book separately their flight, then the insurance, the hotel and at the end rent a car. People don´t want to talk with their friends on MSN, look at their photos on Facebook, share with them videos on Youtube and at the end invite them to an event via Doodle.

It is everywhere. Physical shopping, online shopping, social media.

The next big development in social media is clearly multi-media integration. The networks that can do it in the most convenient way will be the winners. And the winners will take it all. Internet users focus their digital life around single networks rather than around many specialized tools with social features. That also explains the popularity of Facebook. By looking on what activities social media users look for (statistics from March 2009) and elaborating what Facebook offers, it becomes pretty self-explanatory.

But as all the others, also Facebook still has a long way to go before becoming a real one-stop-shop. Some of their big steps are already noticeable. Lets´ have a look for example on integration of applications for different brands. Have you ever come across with such pages as of Starbucks or Coca Cola? And have you ever seen such social media management companies as Vitrue? Those are most probably showing the future way Facebook is going to take … Well, taking into account the potential future revenue streams of Facebook I have published on my previous post, I should correct the sentence. Those are DEFINITIVELY showing the future way Facebook is going to take.