Social media optimisation has become an integral part of online marketing strategies, with Facebook and Twitter being at the core of it. At present, the extent of the involvement is usually either advertisements or basic social media interaction such as micro blogging and profile updates, however announcements earlier this year let us into a potential new development in the social networking world – Facebook credits. These are in essence online money and will enable companies to sell their products via Facebook.
In order to understand this virtual currency a little more, the closest thing it could be related to would essentially be PayPal, which could mean that Facebook could now be posing as a competitor for online shopping directories such as eBay and Amazon. All marketers know how important impulse purchases are and by offering Facebook purchasing power, it could increase the amount of spontaneous transactions from consumers.
This is not the first we have heard of Facebook turning its hand to online retail, previously we have seen Disney in the US offer Facebook users the option to purchase Toy Story 3 tickets via an app for the site and in more recent months certain make up brands also being offered for sale via the site. These trials obviously worked well for the networking site, as it looks like this is the way Facebook are heading.
So the big question for social media and SEO experts is what does it mean for them? Well, nothing is set in stone yet and it will no doubt be years down the line before it takes off completely, so there is little need to panic just yet. If it does progress into something bigger, what we could see is a completely different set of companies using social networking sites. Whereas the social element of sites such as these are favoured for companies offering services and are reliant quite heavily on user recommendations, this could all change if the product element is pushed. What we could experience instead is a harder selling site as opposed to the natural and friendly approach that marketers adopt within social marketing now.
There are still a lot of unanswered questions which remain. With an estimate that Facebook will be pocketing a whopping 30% of any transaction amount, it is clear to see their reasons behind branching out into retail, however whether the companies selling the products feel the same way about this we will have to see. There is also the debate that Facebook could be taking on more than it can chew. Whilst it is good to branch out, it is important to never forget what your bread and butter is. If they followed Google’s example then they would achieve a lot. Google has its hand in a lot of pies, yet we all still know it is a search engine predominantly. Whilst there is little doubt that Facebook could pull of a retail service, there is a risk that the social networking site we know and love could be a distant memory.
About the author:
Posted by Steve.
Link to us
If you want to link to this blog, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.