How can my company use Facebook to profit?
Social media as a personalized and mass communication tool is a growing trend and the ways companies can use it for profit are growing as well. We weren’t surprised when a recent Nielson Report found:
Social networking sites outgrew E-mail in global reach at 68.4% vs. 64.8% in February 2009. And even more significant, in only the first few months of 2009,
the reach of these sites is growing at a brisk pace, faster than any other online sector.
It doesn’t take research reports to understand that people are increasingly using Facebook for personal and professional connections – almost every national brand has a Facebook fan page. So why create a Facebook fan page for your company? The benefits of Facebook fan pages are that they function like a miniature website and personalizes your brand on a platform that is convenient for all.
Less Intrusive & More Effective
Personalization of your brand is the ultimate reason to utilize Facebook – users do not login to get bombarded with ads and in fact despise companies who do. Instead your strategy should follow that of Honda’s Valentine’s day gift. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg discussed how Honda smartly utilized personalized “virtual gifts” to enhance the Facebook user experience and dramatically increased impressions of their website:
“It was a little Honda-branded gift. They paid for 750,000 of them to be given. So 750,000 people gave this heart to 750,000 other people. Then what that generated on the site was talk about Honda, talk about their cars, excitement about some of the things they’re launching, and then more than 200 million impressions. So [those ads] didn’t look like the huge ads you’re used to seeing on other sites, but what they looked like were [Facebook's] news-feed stories. So the advertising experience itself is very integrated into the Facebook experience.”
This key idea here is that your company is able to engage with more customers without seeming too pushy. Every brand that wants to use Facebook to promote should focus on user experience as opposed to product promotion – branded gifts and brand placement in virtual communities could be the best use of Facebook.
Customer Convenience
One Facebook fan page that lacks in popularity but makes it up with innovation is the fan page of 1 800 Flowers. With its recent addition of E-Commerce capabilities on its fan page, 1 800 Flowers is taking advantage of Facebook’s convenient platform. Next time a user is reminded of a friend’s birthday or special anything, they could order flowers without leaving the site. Can your product or service be creatively placed to provide your customers with more convenience? Look for more companies to utilize to the ecommerce capabilities of Facebook.
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