Forbes: Companies should seize the opportunity to market through Facebook

Lead: "Forbes" Network edition today, said, despite the recent strong promotion of the like button, and the sharing of user information with the cooperative website has attracted a lot of criticism, alleged to be a violation of privacy, but business owners should quickly grasp the opportunity, Take full advantage of the huge opportunities Facebook brings to marketing.

The following is a summary of the article:

There has been a lot of negative news around Facebook, and many people accuse Facebook of violating privacy. Still, companies should focus on the huge opportunities Facebook offers.

"The ten golden rules of internet Marketing" (Jay Jay Berkovic), author of Ten Golden Rules for online Marketing workbook, first recalls 1995 years of "Gold Rush", at that time the major companies have just begun to realize that the Internet is based on the creation. If you are smart enough, you should seize the opportunity to reserve the domain name related to the company's business, and if you are very smart, you may also be able to name some other domain names.

A key initiative that business owners should take today is to set up a Facebook page, separate from the private page, and register a specific address for the page, such as the www.facebook.com/company name, and you should also create a corresponding Twitter and LinkedIn business page.

You can then integrate your Web content and applications into the Facebook page through FBML, HTML, and the JavaScript programming package provided by Facebook.

You can also incorporate some Facebook elements into your site, most of which can be achieved by downloading widgets and Plug-ins online for free. Berkowitz points out that if you need more customized functionality, you can hire freelance programmers and it's not expensive.

Berkowitz also mentions other key opportunities, such as mobile and location-based marketing, and promotion via online video, which most companies have not yet fully exploited. At a recent meeting of the South Florida Interactive Marketing Association, he and other speakers focused on Facebook, which, despite its abhorrence of Facebook, should be embraced by marketers in a number of opportunities.

Most privacy issues come from the introduction of the Open Graph API, which enables site operators to add social media capabilities through integration with Facebook. Other sites can now add a "like" button, and Facebook users are accustomed to pressing the button when they see something they love.

Users who log on to Facebook can see the same friends who visit the site, and some sites have started to provide more targeted content based on Facebook users ' personal data.

"Social like buttons will be as important as hyperlinks," Nathaniel Perez, Nitro CEO of Digital marketing and consulting, said Sapient Nier Peyresse. He showed the example of Levi, the apparel company, using the likes button, which allows users to share their preferences with friends by clicking the Like button next to individual outfits.

Consumers who clicked on the button, he said, were actually inviting businesses to learn more about them, and it was easy to collect such information. Data mining, he says, will grow into a huge marketing opportunity mining.

Berkowitz points out that Facebook's ability to share personal information with companies remains a serious issue, and Facebook may indeed be able to change some of its functionality because of pressure from users and regulators.

But he stressed that this possibility would require business owners to quickly grasp the opportunities available. For example, he said, when pop-up ads just appeared, netizens think this form is quite novel, often very happy to click, window ads Click rate of up to 30%. But soon people think pop-up ads are annoying, and security software vendors are starting to provide the tools to screen pop-up ads, and the effect of pop-up ads is plummeting. At least the current integration of Facebook is still tolerated and even favoured by many consumers, especially when the business owners are more ingenious. (Zeng Mu)