In my last post I covered that most businesses feel they need to be on Facebook, but are uncertain as to the benefit and the potential returns. There are many case studies of clients making good returns on Facebook, so how do you join them?

In this post I will be looking at what your fans want and how to go about acquiring some of their loyalty. We are not discussing Facebook advertising in the form of paid banner ads on Facebook  – I’ll leave that to another post in this series. For now we are looking at the community whom you can reach out to via messaging and your fan page. This of course presumes that your business has a place on Facebook. The argument for a Facebook presence is not equal for all businesses. Ecommerce stores fair quite well, however you will face some challenges if you are a B2B company such as law firm specialising in contract law.

With the ongoing development of Facebook’s social search framework, many experts believe that online advertising will be redefined to value user ‘likes’ over authoritative links, which may shift Google’s search power dominance. One of the central features of Facebook is the sharing of interests and ‘likes’ with peers, which provide online advertising companies with a wealth of personalised user information that can be used to create highly targeted online advertising campaigns. The increasing importance of personal relevance is where Facebook trumps over its competitors, but will the social network ever take a larger piece of the online advertising pie?

In order for Facebook’s search power and online advertising to dominate over Google’s, the social networking site will have to attract over one million paying advertisers to its online advertising platform, which will be mobile-centric. According to figures, around half of all Facebook users access the site via a mobile device and the number of mobile users is only expected to increase in the next few years. Facebook has reacted to these trends by purchasing the mobile photo sharing app Instagram for a record $1 billion.

Facebook has become an integral part of how people organise their lives and communicate with friends and family, thus making it one of the most sort after platforms for businesses to communicate with potential customers. While Facebook Ads has just had a revamp, Facebook Offers looks to up the game as it extends to new regions internationally and in cyber space.

Facebook Offers has been developed to be integrated into the Facebook platform as the Social Media Competition for Groupon and LivingSocial and can be used for no extra charge by registered merchants. Testing has been occurring in the US and now is being extended to Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Singapore to further test market penetration. Merchants will have offers show up in users that have “Liked” their page and users claim offers when they show up in their timeline. Once a user claims the offer, an email will be sent to them and their friends will be notified that they have claimed an offer from the merchant.

Facebook has recently acquired the mobile photo sharing application Instagram for a record $1 billion dollars, which has left many commentators scratching their heads as to why the price tag was so high. Clearly this decision was not made on a whim by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, but possibly indicates that the leading social networking site plans to take on a new direction, and mobile photo sharing is part of the plan.

According to figures, Facebook users are increasingly accessing the site and making use of its features via mobile devices and in a public statement Facebook admitted that it needs to build its mobile strategy. Instagram already has a large user base of over 25 million worldwide, making it the largest social network on the mobile platform. However, even though Instagram has great online success, it is a relatively small company with only thirteen employees and currently has no incoming revenue. Facebook’s real interest in Instragram is its photo sharing capabilities, which highlights the significance of photo sharing in the online social experience, something that Facebook hopes to capitalise on.

Almost every client of ours has asked me this question and it is a question that has run through most business owners & marketing execs’ minds. They think they need to be doing it, some are doing it, few people actually know what it is bringing them and no-one seems to be able to tell them for sure.

I recently was copied in on an internal client email that went something along the lines of “oh, by the way, we generated £6k of revenue from direct referrals from Facebook this year to date” to which the MD’s response was simply “Er- Wow!”, his surprise mainly because for them, not an insignificant sum of money from a channel they had thus far ignored. Ignored in the fact that they had done some fundamentals but looked no further at it.

According to the laws of gravity, what goes up must come down, and according to research by GobalWebIndex this is also the case with Facebook. So let’s look at the up: The social networking giant has experienced unprecedented growth over the past few years and widespread Facebook usage has revolutionised the way people connect and exchange information. The social networking platform has also successfully accumulated the largest database of personal user information the globe has ever seen, much to the glee of advertisers. It goes without saying that Facebook is one of the most valuable Internet companies in the world. This news may have search marketers scrambling to revise their online strategies or looking around fervently for the next big social media hit. But on second thought, how much should we be concerned?

The SES Conference is coming to the Big Apple next week. From March 19th to March 23rd the conference will captivate SEO and experts from around the globe. The problem for many small businesses is that they struggle to find the time and/or the money to better understand and utilise search engine strategies (SES). By following this conference or reading highlights and summaries of the goings on, one can really gain insight into the current best practices of this exciting and ever-developing industry. What an SES conference aims to do is pool the knowledge of various authorities in the field into one region where they can exchange ideas and comment on new developments in the world of media and engine marketing.

The New York SES conference is sure to be a hub of industry enthusiasts and the event covers everything from social media and paid search to SEO and integrated marketing. The conference consists of about seventy sessions and close on one hundred exhibitors as well as a multitude of like-minded individuals with a passion for with SES. It’s not all business though, as there are also plenty of opportunities to network at the variety of after-parties throughout the week.

From humble beginnings crashing Harvard’s servers in 2003 to a $5 billion IPO offering that is sure to head north, Facebook has gone from strength to strength. Generating close to 85% of its $1 billion profit for 2011 from advertising, Mark Zuckerberg has always been tentative to lose the ‘cool’ aspect of Facebook to blatant advertising and yet without it we would likely have no Facebook at all. The good news comes directly to brands and companies who have a Facebook page for marketing reasons; the new ‘Timeline’ feature (which has received both hot and cold responses) went live last week for brands who want to take advantage of it.

Along with that a new feature for advertisers has been revealed called Facebook Premium which promises to offer seamless advertising at a premium rate to companies who opt for that optional package.