Come on everyone! You need to CRUSH IT!

Kidding. You won’t read any bullshit “shamwow” speech here about making it rich with a 200 dollar flip cam and a YouTube account. Truth is, the power of social media is including everyone else and using their collective creativity to build something new – not just talking about yourself. Being a self promoter doesn’t make you a social media expert. No, it makes you a good self promoter.

It kills me how many people just don’t get it. However, when your follower count on Twitter approaches the 500k mark I could see where it would be easy to get a big head about yourself.

But, but – all it takes is transparency!

Not really. Not only are there lots of things that companies should NOT share (or individuals for that matter) but there are lots of things that just aren’t really that important to share with the public. Raise your hand if you care that Tony Hsieh accidentally filled his car with premium gas instead of plain old unleaded? I like Tony, but that tweet didn’t sell any shoes, nor did it really make him or his brand any more interesting. Transparency like that is really fucking boring.

I still rarely if ever see anyone actually using the creations of others (or even ASKING fans/customers) to create something on behalf of a brand. Today I read that Flickr had its 4 billionth photo posted this past weekend. How many business owners have gone to Flickr and looked for interesting photos that fans of their brand have taken. How many have you commented on, or asked for permission to use in your own online or offline marketing? If there answer is none, you really ought to go out to sites like Flickr, Vimeo or even YouTube and see some of the AMAZING things ordinary, non blow hard people are creating daily. I think you might be shocked at what you find.

Truth is, there is very little that a Facebook page can’t do in terms of replacing the functionality you’d have on your own web site. And, with its built in audience and advertising platform, could you actually be better off with simply having your Facebook page be your home page?

First, an observation on social networking traffic

Social media is a great way to drive traffic to your web site – it isn’t necessarily a great way to keep traffic on your site. What I have personally seen from working with many clients across multiple verticals in relation to traffic and social media is that you can generally expect a high bounce rate. This is true especially with blogs. Why is that? I think its because folks on social networks are so used to seeing direct links to articles, pictures or even video from a wide variety of sources. They are also used to tools like Twitter and Digg or even RSS readers bringing content to them that they very rarely feel the need to spend time on a site or blog. Your friends send you a link, you take a look, then leave. Its just the standard operating procedure for web users these days.

How would a Facebook page remedy this issue? Well, first, any time you have something new to post as a business (a new product announcement or press release, perhaps a contest or marketing campaign) that messaging will live on your fans news feed. Here, it will likely be seen several times before falling off the radar. More opportunities to be seen = more opportunities to be clicked upon and potentially commented on or liked, which of course will help the content live longer and be spread further.

Second, the investment of creating a Facebook page vs. a web site

Planning for and building a new web site can be incredibly expensive. Even the most bare bones sites, in terms of function, can cost up to $20,000 to get up and running. Of course, there are some free options out there for hosting your site, but most companies would want to opt for a professionally designed web site with a CMS system backended by a database. You also have hosting to consider, along with finding a lucrative domain name if you don’t already have one.

Contrast this with having your company site based on Facebook. You’ve got a great framework for working off of, and with a little effort you can recreate the functionality of a commerce site with some FBML coding. For this you might need to hire a consultant but you will still come out ahead of where you might be if you brought on a developer to retrofit an existing e-commerce application into your own web site. Once you have 100 or more fans, you are eligible to register your own vanity URL through Facebook, one of the premiere domains on the web (facebook.com/your-company). I’d also mention, if you have an existing domain name registered you can easily redirect it to your Facebook page instead.

I also took into account analytics. As a search marketer, analytics is the guide which I follow to determine campaign effectiveness or to provide direction for future search engine optimization or paid search efforts. This is one tricky spot for Facebook – you get page insights which are similar to say, Google Analytics, however you don’t get keyword searches from exterior sources (say, Google or Yahoo) nor do you get to see exits, bounce rate, top pages, etc. My guess is that you could potentially tie in Google Analytics tracking code into your own Facebook page to expose some of that data, however I’ve not personally tried it (if you have, please let me know your experience in the comments).

Facebook Ad Creation

Third, your marketing and advertising investment

Facebook advertising, much like PPC search marketing, is incredibly cost effective. You can spend as much or little as you want, and Facebook has killer targeting. Just over the past few weeks the Facebook team added some incredible new options for advertisers to pinpoint just the people who are likely to respond to ads.

First you can now target keywords used in the past 30 days in users status updates. That is incredibly powerful, just think about it. Literally you can target keywords in conversations. Amazing. You can now also selectively include the fans (or exclude) of particular products. Let’s say I have my own breakfast treat and I want to show an ad to the approximately 775k fans of Pop Tarts – I can!

Beyond these new targeting options, Facebook advertising can be interactive. You can display videos and even become a fan of a product from an advertisement without leaving your page. You can RSVP for events or leave comments about an ad from your page too.

It really isn’t that crazy of an idea

I think that making a Facebook page your company home page is a very interesting idea. Perhaps in the future this will be the preferred way of doing things. What do you think?

Lets get one thing out of the way from the outset. Just because I think retweets (much like hashtags) are more or less workarounds for the failings of Twitter as a communication tool, that doesn’t mean they aren’t effective. One of my most popular posts on Examiner, the 5 reasons Facebook is better for marketing than Twitter, benefited greatly from retweeting. In an evening, the viral spread of the link to that post, almost entirely through RT’s amassed me over 1,000 views. Not bad when you think about it, really.

But the reason retweets came into existence in the first place was because Twitter users got frustrated with not being able to share the tweets they found with their friends. Unlike Facebook, favorites are buried on Twitter. You could look at a users “favorited” tweets but let’s face it, no one does.

Again, same thing with hashtags. People started to use the hash symbol in conjunction with keywords or abbreviations (#sxsw for example denotes South by South West) in order to provide a more efficient way of searching for related conversion on Twitter.

There have even been businesses form around the concept of retweets. TweetMeme and ReTweet.com are just 2 services which track the most popular conversations on Twitter based upon the number of RTs they get. You can even get into the act by clicking on the retweet button accompanying each post on this site.

Project Retweet

Project Retweet was announced today Twitter as an official way to deal with retweeting. Essentially, the ability to re-tweet a tweet on your timeline will be included in the standard Twitter web UI as well as through API calls that third party developers can take advantage of.

Mashable wrote a great post about how these changes will affect what people have come to know about retweeting. Now, it will be possible to see messages from people you don’t follow in your twitter feed – something I am not looking forward to as I have recently pruned about 800 people from my followed list.

I feel for the company’s which developed their own tools to facilitate this non-standard way of sharing tweets. However, I really feel bad for Twitter in that they feel forced to engineer hack workarounds to obvious flaws in their product. These do not feel like well though out changes.

First, I really admire and honestly, envy, the team that got to come and speak. It must be really awesome to go around the country and speak to large ballrooms full of Internet marketers about Facebook. The site is a enormous success, is growing by hundreds of thousands of users a week, and is worth several billion dollars. If you have read any of my writings about Facebook, you know I am an enormous fan of the site.

Second, these guys really know how to put together a presentation. Their slides were great, included some pretty damned impressive video snippets (high production value) and were full of useful information.

Third, attendees were provided links to some great, comprehensive documentation that talks about best practices for using Facebook for business marketing and advertising.

Much of the presentation focused on the basics of using Facebook for business marketing and I was hoping for a little more technical (specifically, Facebook Connect and customization of Facebook pages using FBML, etc) but this was a really good time.

Recently I wrote a post on Facebook Business Marketing on my work blog. Facebook has become a passion of mine ever since Twitter became overrun with “social media analysts and experts.” Why Facebook? Well, you just don’t see as many of those folks over there.

Anyway check out the post if you are a small business owner (or even, a large business owner) and are interested in how you might go about using Facebook to reach customers. The post details how to create a Facebook Business page, and has effective tactics that I’ve used with clients to promote their businesses on Facebook.

Let me know what you think about it!