“But Facebook is designed for my nephew, not for my business.” This is a common refrain among the CMOs and Heads of Digital Marketing who grasp the strategic benefits of social media for businesses, but are still wrapping their heads around implementation. Fortuantely, that common refrain is not entirely accurate.
Facebook has long provided companies with customizable landing pages (see screenshot), enabling brands to treat Facebook business profiles/fan pages as extensions of existing, more design-intense home pages. And for those businesses looking to grow their networks agressively on Facebook (for the purposes of product promotion, limited time offers, or just to kick things off with a bang), Facebook offers targeted advertising campaigns. By no means a subsitute for worthwhile, consistent engagement across the Business page itself, these ads represent an inflection point in the way Facebook makes money, as well as the way businesses can generate attention, engage that attentive audience, and eventually convert new business themselves.
Twitter announced earlier this week that is it beta-testing a“Twitter Business Center Tool-kit.” (Screen shots courtesy of Mashable’s Ben Parr and ISF interactive’s Dave Peck). This marks a significant turning point in Twitter’s business utility as it demonstrates that Twitter itself, but more importantly Twitter users themselves, want businesses to have greater capability online. In turn, this informs businesses that potential customers do in fact exist on Twitter, and are waiting to be found. Logistically, the innovations that Twitter is testing will not fundamentally alter the user experience, but it will make it more streamlined on the business end.
The Twitter for business tool-kit will enable businesses to have multiple people updating a centralized business Twitter feed via it’s “Contributors” tab. No more will employees have to share a centralized log-in, bumping the other off the profile when another logs in – now, each employee can publish to the site in a way reflective of each unique personality. Other benefits to business include instant profile verification (Ben Parr speaks to those benefits here), as well as the ability to accept direct messages with having to follow a person/customer back. This is ideal for those businesses like a Southwest Airlines or a Zappos who handle a great deal of customer inquries about specific purchases, but it’s also ideal for financial services firms, professional services organizations, and real estate companies whose audience would prefer a more discrete, secure means of communication.
FourSquare makes implementation and management an intuitive process for business owners. Offering step-by-step profile set-up instructions and a highly intuitive metrics platform, tracking everythinng from the number of daily “check-ins” to the gender and demographics of visitors, FourSqaure offers brick-and-mortar businesses both a virtual and offline insight and capability.
What these innovations boil down to is the fact that social networks want to make implementation and usage for businesses easier because they want them to engage online, because their customers are asking for it. The space will continue to evolve, and those businesses that invest now and make sense of what is a currently very accommodating, intuitive landscape will be well-positioned for nimble evolution as social networks continue to evolve themslves.
