Chris Johnson (left) & Scott McAndrew Founder, Director of Strategy Terralever

We Have 100,000 Fans on Facebook. Now what?
Facebook presents a great opportunity to engage in social marketing at scale for large brands. The challenge that comes with this opportunity is how to best leverage the environment, technology and tools of Facebook to achieve desired results for your brand. Facebook has done a fantastic job of delivering a set of simple social interaction tools for social marketers to build groups of loyal fans and engage with them on an ongoing basis. Following a steep learning curve, Fan Pages, Status Updates and App concepts are now common place conversation for most large brands. The sum and substance of conversation between brand and customer has been completely reshaped in a few short years, but as the collective has had a chance to pause and take a breath, a new question as emerged: What’s a marketer to do to innovate in this space?

Facebook provides an incredibly extensible API that opens the door for incredible innovations for those willing to experiment and invest with the next level of Facebook marketing. For all that’s come before it, what Facebook has recently made available to brands represents a seismic paradigm shift.

The Evolution of Facebook Social Marketing
Facebook Connect
Facebook Connect presents the most compelling opportunity for Facebook innovation to-date. By giving brands the ability to take the social graph outside of Facebook and provide visitors with relevant, social context beyond Facebook’s walled garden, brands can deliver unique, engaging and relevant experiences to Facebook users on their sites while having tighter control over experience, data and analytics. While seemingly complex, at its core Facebook Connect can be broken down into three distinct components, each with its own advantage:

Single Sign-on: By side-stepping your site’s traditional registration process and leveraging Facebook’s authentication mechanisms, you can greatly simplify both registration and logging in on your site. It also presents a clear user benefit of not needing to create yet another user name and password combination, which is no small achievement in today’s world.

The Portable Social Graph: Once a Facebook user has agreed to connect his/her Facebook profile with your site you can deliver an experience that leverages that person’s social graph in a highly compelling fashion. What’s more interesting to your customers: a view of all social activity around your brand, or a view of how my Facebook friends have been engaging? Most Facebook connect implementations have just scratched the surface of this potential. Look for significant innovation with this aspect of Facebook Connect in the coming year.

Publishing Activity Back to Facebook: Since the dawn of Facebook marketing the holy grail of Facebook efforts has been to get exposure to the stream. As the effective home page of Facebook, reliably getting activity to appear in users’ streams can be the difference between a successful Facebook campaign and failure. Facebook Connect gives users the option of publishing activity on a brand’s site back into Facebook, gaining the brand that additional exposure without the individual contributor ever being on the Facebook site. The effective use of these three aspects of Facebook Connect create an enormous opportunity for the execution of new, creative ideas bringing brands, existing sites and Facebook together in powerful ways. 2010 will see new interpretations of social marketing in the form of innovative Facebook Connect implementations.

Fan Page Specific Applications
Facebook provides a set of simple core applications for brands to leverage within the Facebook Fan Page environment. While these core applications provide an expected, easy-to-use method of engaging with the brand and others, many brands are looking to provide more for their fans at the Page level. Facebook provides a comprehensive API that opens the door for any amount of custom interaction within the context of a custom application. While 99% of investment in the development of Facebook Applications has been focused on developing stand-alone applications, 2010 will see brands investing in the development of custom experiences for fans of the brand.

Fan pages with large numbers of users see wall interaction that can only be described as chaos, with little value to both the brand and to fans. While being able to provide a tailored experience for fans is a key benefit to this approach, brands will also see great benefit from tighter control (and ownership) of data, and the ability to integrate more advanced analytics than Facebook provides with the core Fan Page structure.