Marketing On Facebook Grows Up (Ask Your Lawyer!)
By Patrick Courtney
In the past year Facebook has become all but a staple in an online marketer’s repertoire thanks to their accelerated global growth and widening appeal across demographics. There are few brands out there that wouldn’t stand to benefit from an official Page for customers to connect with. Pages have offered myriad methods of engagement, from conversation starters and quick and easy giveaways in the status updates to custom built applications and data integrations offering deeper levels of consumer engagement.
However, Facebook’s success isn’t all good for marketers. For one, Facebook’s staggering growth has exposed them to more legal issues, and as Facebook fills up their liability soft spots, marketers feel the pinch. Just recently, Facebook outlawed conducting any giveaways or promotions through page status updates. All promotions on Facebook must now be done through 3rd party apps, and Facebook must be indemnified. That’s a pretty high barrier to what used to be a casual, effortless process. Countless Pages from small to big name brands have been running these types of promotions to garner fans, grow brand awareness on Facebook, and increase customer engagement for quite some time. It doesn’t appear as though Facebook has begun to crack down on this just yet, but they will likely soon.
Second, the discovery of Facebook as a viable marketing tool has led to a deluge of brands jumping into the Facebook Page game. As consumers become fans and interact with pages, their friends’ news feeds begin to fill up with these brand interactions, which they may or may not care about. To counter this and other issues, Facebook launched a simplified version of its platform, fittingly called Facebook Lite. The biggest change for marketers is that no longer do these Fan Page actions hit the news feed. You won’t see “Jane Doe became a fan of Brand X” anymore, or “John Smith added the SuperBrand Application.” The stream is streamlined, with only status updates populating the stream, and the Highlights section is 86’d.
It all sounds like bad news but in reality this is an opportunity for marketers; marketers who understand what engagement really means, that is. As the marketing fence goes up, brands that’ve relied solely on giveaways, promotions, flashy games and stumble-upons will be looking through the pickets, and the brands that authentically engage with consumers and keep a real person behind the voice will be tending the greener garden. Better to start now while you can still hop the fence.
