Last week at commercial Tech London, a key conference & meeting point for the know-how sector’s commercial players, Facebook had a immense physical presence. Its booth stood out in the midst of a crowded exhibition hall, only dwarfed in size & impact by the Google stall, which had its own floor, one above, overlooking the whole scene.
You could say it was apt staging by the conference’s organisers: Google head & shoulders above the remainder of the know-how scene, leading the way in innovation, online promotion & most importantly, digital revenues.
However, Facebook, both with its recent feature developments & commercial presence at commercial Tech, is sending out a message to brands & is unashamedly trying to take Google’s mantle as the place for companies to promote effectively on the net.
Facebook is clearly trying to sell the idea that on its site companies can reach out to customers before they even know what they are looking for, unlike when using a search engine such as Google or Microsoft’s Bing.
The social network’s direct challenge to Google was pointed out to me by Nate Elliot, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, who was so surprised by this newly overt commercial strategy that they felt compelled to jot down what Facebook had written on the wall of its commercial Tech booth. The slogan said: “Find your customers before they search.”
& then at the beginning of this week, Facebook launched a pages discovery device which it slipped out quietly under the radar. fundamentally the new device is designed to help users discover branded pages as well as helping people find musicians & celebrities. “Page Browser” suggests pages to a user based on what they like, helping them to narrow down their browsing to categories, such as companies, & also permit people to discover interests based on what their friends like & what country they are in. Add this to the fact that people have began to shop on the social network (admittedly still a small base relative to ecommerce giants like Amazon) using shopping aggregators such as Payvment & it is clear Facebook is definitely trying to build a web within a web.
In the last two weeks, Facebook has also launched Places in the United Kingdom. This mobile phone application allows users to alert their friends to their current location & provide a real-time update of what they are doing & where. It means people can now use the service to tell people about a great restaurant to visit or even a great spot for a picnic. The company has yet to turn on the commercial side of this new function, but the whole service screams local promotion served in real-time.
The fact that people can speak about their purchases basically before purchasing them, with their actual friends, on a platform designed wholly around communication with people they trust, definitely sounds like a compelling proposition for commerce online.
Joelle Musante, chief operating officer of Payvment, which defines itself as a social commerce platform, unsurprisingly believes ecommerce on the largest social network on the planet is going to get gigantic – with major brands such as Avon having began to sell their products by the site. According to Payvment it's 30,000 retailers on board, 200,000 users per month & with an average cart value of $42 (£26).
In its bid to attract major promotion cash, Facebook is trying to pull all that’s great about the world wide web: messaging, shopping, photo-tagging, location sharing, question-answering in to one place.
If Facebook can get people to conduct most of their web activities through its service, it can increase the time spent on the site by the increasing amount of eyeballs – & then charge increasing amounts to brands for serving targeted commercials. However, taking a step back, it’s necessary for companies to apply some healthy scepticism.
Facebook’s core challenge is to make people pay attention to promotion messages by companies. This is why companies promotion on Facebook require to make their brand message an engaging piece of content, as against a display commercial, so that there is something the users can “like” on Facebook or share. It’s a different surroundings to Google, & one within which the marketer has to compete hard to get the user’s attention..
The main issue with Facebook versus Google is that people do not come to Facebook & declare their intentions, which limits the serving of highly targeted promotion. The second issue is usage. According to Elliot, one time as plenty of people are using search engines as are using social networks. & the third issue is attention. The fact is promotion within user-generated content, which Facebook is made up of, doesn’t work as well because people are focused on the other people’s activities on the site, as against any commercial activities.
Companies require to keep abreast of the immense changes & upcoming commercial opportunities on a site quickly heading towards a billion users. However, Facebook as an promotion surroundings is still no match for Google, in terms of usage & the comprehension of intent, ultimately leading to consumption by click-throughs.
Equally, the promotion model around location-based tools has yet to progress much further beyond a voucher-type system, which means businesses finish up giving away freebies all the time – without much proof of return. there is still lots of work to be done in unlocking the worth of this model. & finally, the ecommerce model on social networks is still very nascent & understandably plenty of brands are nervous about selling their articles for sale in uncharted territory.
Facebook’s best function for companies, which brands can do through dedicated pages & highly innovative promotion campaigns, is to get people speaking. Then, hopefully, if the brand messages are deployed correctly, after consulting with their friends, they will click through & convert the time spent by a company on engaging users in to hard cash.
