July 13, 2009
Thumbs up, Facebook
I’m really liking Facebook these days. It’s far from the be all and end all of social media strategy, and the company often makes stupid policy decisions, like banning breast feeding photos while allowing hate speech, but it has made some very smart moves of late that truly make it a necessary part of your social media strategy.
Let’s start with Facebook Connect. If a company has developed or is planning to develop a rich media site with authentication, it should definitely consider using Facebook Connect. This eliminates the need to develop your own authentication and makes it far easier to tap into the 200-million-plus Facebook user base. Once logged in, your site users can then easily share the content on your site with their friends on Facebook.
Next, there’s the latest addition to the tool set, the Facebook Fan Box.
The Fan Box makes is easy to add Facebook Fan Page content to your existing website. This will be very valuable to transactional websites — those that don’t have many interactive or relationship oriented features on the site – but who have made a commitment to developing a strong Facebook Fan Page.
The key to making the Fan Box a successful addition to your site, of course, is to actively engage your customers on Facebook. That means more than company announcements and the occasional poll.
That’s where Insights, the analytics provided by Facebook about your page, will be so useful, especially when combined with your web analytics. This data tells you what works, and what doesn’t, on your Fan Page. Combine it with your web analytics, user data and if you have a blog, blog analytics, and you can get a good picture of your customer’s engagement with your brand.
Additional Resources
- My recent posts about Facebook and community:
- An excellent guide to creating Facebook Fan Pages from The Advance Guard
–
The Society for New Communications Research announces call for entries for annual awards.
September 15th, 2009 at 9:08 am
[...] Thumbs Up Facebook (7/13/2009) It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood (7/7/2009) My Facebook page experiment (6/17/2009) The great Facebook URL grab (6/16/2009) Facebook. The gateway drug to social media (6/4/2009) What does Facebook want to be when it grows up (11/1/2007) Ways to grow your business? Piss off the moms? Not. (9/26/2007) [...]