Social Marketing
Posted on December 4, 2007 by Martin Zagorsek
Businesses started using social networks to market to consumers ages ago, it doesn’t even seem weird anymore for a corporation to have a MySpace page with tens of thousands of “friends”, and of course this year the politicians got into the act in a big way. In keeping with Facebook’s more controlled style, things started a bit more slowly - initially a lot of businesses formed Groups, and people could belong to them to show affinity, hear the latest news, etc.
Now Facebook has full-blown business pages, where companies can show off their products, announce events, etc… and they’re starting to tailor them for different kinds of businesses, so that restaurant pages have a tweaked version of the Wall app that lets people post reviews. A quick search on “restaurant” only yielded about 100 pages, but they range from Chicago sushi joints to a cocktail bar in Kazakhstan.
The goal of course is to get these businesses to buy Facebook’s new Social Ads, which despite the controversy are ideal especially for small businesses with limited budgets - think about a restaurant targeting only people who like sushi and live in a certain area. If it works well, it could be an improvement over even AdWords. But what Facebook really should do is what BlogBang is doing - let users choose and endorse the ads themselves. Rather than the slightly creepy and probably imperfect behind-the-scenes targeting, they’d be directly tapping into people’s own knowledge of one another’s interests, and picking up the power of word-of-mouth to boot.
Sphere: Related Content» Filed Under Social Networking, Word of Mouth
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