I’ve spent the morning looking at Facebook Connect and thinking of how this wonderful tool can be used in a B2B context. And I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no one single answer (surprise surprise!).
Learn more about Facebook Connect here.
Anyway, here’s the scenario – you’ve got a site, visitors come and register on your site, you’ve got some data collection fields. Now imagine that through your site and through m0re or less the same registration/login process, you can access your visitors’ Facebook profile information as well.
It is immediately evident how this feature can be of use if you’re in B2C marketing or retail (especially if you’re selling a number of brands or different kinds of products) – but even in a B2B context, there’s a lot of potential to use this tool. Let’s explore a couple of “principles” down below. We are proceeding with the assumption though that you’re working in a market where at least some of your audience is online. It’s important to stress that if you’re working in a market or industry (or country!) where nobody is doing anything on Facebook, your role then potentially becomesthat of a Thought Leader and Educator.Let’s not go there for the moment. So, here are our thoughts:
1. Businesspeople are “people” too
A lot of professionals are on Facebook, and looking at some of my peers’ profiles, increasingly personal and professional posts and updates are being mixed up. And for the moment, Facebook is the defacto standard social networking platform – at least in the US and the UK. Facebook Connect allows you to allow your users to share the content on your site with their colleagues or friends without ever leaving your site.
2. You want to know more about your customers
Potentially of more importance to people who are sales and client focused. Would you not like to know what your customers are like “as people” as opposed to when they have their game-face on? Think of relationship-building possibilities based purely on how much more you know about a company and the people working there than your competitors. This could be simply their attitudes towards social media, what they think of the economy, their understanding of what you do or just the fact that they like golf.
3.Engagement andpropagation at the same time
Facebook Connect allows users to comment on content on your site, and then share it pretty instantaneously, all simultaneously. There’s a caveat here though – you’ve got to first have a content strategy in place to generate the kind of content that people will actually want to share with people.
The above three are barelyscratching the surface of what Facebook Connect can do. For me, the biggest practical obstacle sems to be actually the development work required for a successful integration of Connect into your site.
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
Tags: facebook, social media
