In Focus

5 fresh Facebook apps

Apps that make friends

Facebook applications deliver that much-beloved engagement factor -- and marketers have begun to demonstrate that these interactions translate into better awareness and actually boost sales.

Facebook Connect, launched in December 2008, enables applications to perform double-duty as display ads. When you add an application, Facebook lets everyone know about it by automatically placing a comment in your news feed -- the running list of all actions you've performed (and opted to make public). In other words, the marketing content is passively distributed without the user having to choose to share it -- and at no additional cost to the marketer.

Because of the somewhat random nature of many users' lists of "friends" (which often include people they've never met), brands have an opportunity, simply by showing up in the news feed, to gain exposure to consumers who lie outside the expected target.

Let's take a look at how five brands made new friends.

 

Comments

Merlin Calo
Merlin Calo September 16, 2009 at 1:31 PM

Interesting article on social marketing.

I was curious to what SMB stands for and what tools are used by these companies to measure results of web traffic from these FB aps?

Dave Sonn
Dave Sonn September 16, 2009 at 9:54 AM

Great Article!!!
Facebook Applications are amazingly powerful if done correctly. Facebook Platform, the toolkit Facebook offers developers, provides many touch points where both the application and users can distribute alerts and links to Friends. These are unbelievably viral.

A few quick tips: 1. You need to offer some kind of prize to entice engagement. 2. Building a robust app is a mountain of work that needs exceptional planning and testing. 3. Apply for Facebook Verification and let them promote you. 4. Success does not happen overnight or by chance, regardless of the amazing stories.

We just launched 7 apps. Here's an example of what we're doing: http://www.last2left.com/facebook-sports-contests.html