On November 6th, Facebook dropped more great news for advertisers keen to find ways to monetise the fastest growing social network in the world.
They are:
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Facebook Social Ads
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Facebook Beacon
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Facebook Platform
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Facebook Pages
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Facebook Insights
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Facebook Polls
I will be covering some of these in more detail shortly, but one of the most significant tools to come out of the announcement are Facebook Pages (like ours), not because they are per se, revolutionary (after all, Facebook already has Groups and Sponsored Groups) but because they now allow users to find previously "closed" Facebook content from outside and allow internal Facebook users outside of the group to your website.
Here is a brief summary:
1. Pages are public. Most of Facebook can only be accessed by a login, preventing search engines from indexing them. However, pages have a public non-Facebook member "version" allowing the search engines to index the page.
The public are now able to find previously unseen content (maybe from a standard Facebook Group), visit the Facebook page, and sign-up to the Page and then visit your site via the links contained within.
2. Pages include links. Because the pages are public, you can get some nice Facebook.com link credit. You can’t use an anchor text, but hey, it’s free.
3. Send “updates to fans”. Fans are effectively members of your Page. Sending “updates” to fans is an effective way of building a database of interested users allowing you to send messages about new products, website or blog updates.
4. You control the Page as you do your own profile. Using the awesome power of Facebook applications, you can make your Page as sticky as any website. Show rich media content, play music, show images – but more importantly, give members enough content (and the links to do it) to allow them to go and buy something!
5. Activity within the Page is published on member’s profiles. Joining and interacting with your Page adds a note to that users News Feed. The beauty of this is that friends of your Fan get to see they are doing something within your Page. Consider it a viral membership news stream.
The more we use Pages, the more we are likely to discover a whole host of other benefits, but next will be Social Ads. Imagine being able to target ads based on a Facebook User’s personal interests…
3 Comments
Sorry to point it out but links in the facebook page include the rel=”nofollow” attribute so they won’t do your page rank any good.
They are still functional links so you can still make use of the fact that your link is on a page that is searchable within Facebook. In terms of driving traffic you have to look one step removed from direct search engine results.
nice article, but facebook kicks company profiles.
You’re absolutely right, companies DO get kicked-out of Facebook if they try and create a PROFILE, but not if they create a page.
A Facebook Page is designed specifically for companies to promote themselves – avoiding them being banned for using profiles.