As of writing this entry there are nearly 3000 polished Facebook applications developed for the F8 Facebook developer’s platform, but only a very small number of those applications were developed with the intent of earning revenue.

The Challenges of Facebook Application Monetization

• Contextual Advertising Does Not WorkSteve O’Hear, a social networks and Facebook blogger for ZDNet, brings to light that Facebook suffers incredibly low click-through rates for advertising campaigns (0.04% per 1.4 million impressions) thus ruling out the lazy-man’s monetizing option, contextual advertising campaigns like Google AdSense. As though abysmally low click-through rates weren’t enough to deter one from employing AdSense Jawad Shuaib the author of the most prominent monetized F8 application, “My Favorite Books,” writes:
  

  Part of the reason is that Facebook does not allow developers to embed JavaScript within their code; hence making it difficult to enable Google Adsense for the content. Moreover, as is the case with MySpace, contextual advertising is not targeted enough to earn sizable revenues.

  I’ll be the first one to thank Facebook for sparing us from a barrage AdSense bulk on all of my friends’ pages.

• Facebook Users are Suffering from “Facebook Application Fatigue”When I began telling some of my fraternity brothers and friends that I was developing a Facebook application, the first thing I got was a long groan and something along the lines of “not another %^#@ing Facebook application!” Apparently, this is not just a phenomenon localized to Vanderbilt students; a handful of bloggers are reporting the very same frustrated sentiment.Facebook users want a limited number of apps visible on their profile page. This means that your application will not only be competing with applications within similar domains, but your application will also be competing for precious real-estate space on every individual user’s Facebook profile page.I will be doing a post dedicated to the causes of “Facebook Application Fatigue” in the very near future.
• Large Number of EntrantsThere are nearly 3000 published applications available for Facebook users so it has become very difficult for great Facebook applications to get noticed. It is no longer just enough to simply “add” a Facebook application to the directory and wait for the users to come rolling in; you have to actively reach out to Facebook users and get them to adopt your application willingly.This is especially true given how long the wait delay is on the Facebook Application directory.In order to get users, you are going to have to make your application stand out above the competition. No one will adopt it simply by virtue of its existence.
• Most Facebook Applications Fail to Create Additional Value Facebook is not a “content” service so much as it is a “communication” service. People do not log-on onto Facebook to read RSS feeds, get the latest weather, look-up movie times, and such, as those services are not inherently conducive to Facebook’s function as a communication medium.Applications such as iLike (favorite songs, music videos), Graffiti (MS Paint tool for wall posts), and Video (upload home videos and tag your friends in them) are all popular examples of applications that are conform to Facebook’s original intent.The problem with most application designers is they view user-service interaction as “content” production. The fact of the matter is, Facebook is not user-service interaction, like how Google is, but it’s all user-user interaction with the service acting as a communication link. When a user lists his or her music or film preferences on Facebook, it is for the express purpose of communication those interests to his or her peers, not so random people on the Internet can look them up and say “Oh hey, I like Boondock Saints too!”

Designing a Facebook Application with Monetization in Mind

• Remember Facebook’s Ultimate Purpose – Communicate!Avoid the traditional downward spiral that most Facebook application developers fall for – FACEBOOK IS NOT ABOUT CONTENT. It’s about communication. Here are some ways that you can design your application to perform a “communication” versus a “content” service:
  1. Design your application to publish interests that currently are not served adequately by Facebook or other existing applications. My Favorite Books is a great example of such a service; it is essentially an upgrade to the existing “books” section on Facebook. iLike on the other hand publishes song and music video preferences, which weren’t available on Facebook at all prior to the F8 release.
  2. Design your application to create innovative forms of peer interaction that are not currently available to Facebook. Graffiti and Honesty Box are both new ways of communicating to your friends on Facebook. Honesty Box allows you send receive and send anonymous messages and Graffiti allows you to send and receive graphical messages; neither of these services were available before.
  3. Design your application to establish unique relationships with other Facebook users. Top Friends and Greek Family Tree are examples of popular applications used for establishing relationships between groups of users; while Top Friends publishes generic relationships, Greek Family Tree focuses on specific Greek organization hierarchies between older/young siblings.
• Release a High Quality Application Tomorrow Versus a Medicore One TodayFacebook users are fickle. It comes with the territory of catering to college and high school students. Users pick up and dump Facebook applications all the time; just because iLike is the number one song and music video application today does not guarantee that it will be that way in three months. An application that is
  1. Easiest to use
  2. Occupies the smallest amount of profile space
  3. Provides distinctive communicative value
  4. Is easiest to install and set up
  5. Provides the highest quality of service

  will prevail over the competition so long as those points remain intact. So don’t rush your application for the sake of “being first.” Instead, take as much time as you need to “be the best.”

• For Interest Publication Services: Find Referral Services to Sell Related ProductsThe key to My Favorite Books‘ profitability is its incorporation of an Amazon.com referral system. If you’re browsing a friend’s Facebook profile with the application installed, you can follow a link to purchase any of the “favorited” books from Amazon.com, and in the process, earn the My Favorite Books developers a 4% commission on the sale.This is a very simple and easy model to follow. Just find a good referring service for your domain and use affiliate links on all of the interests.
• For Communication Innovations: Charge a Small Usage Fee or SubscriptionThis is the model that Facebook employs to for its Gift service; charge a $1 fee for a small graphic of a “gift” to appear on someone else’s page? Well if you have a million users give each someone one gift each, you have yourself a pile of cash.Facebook application developers should not shy away from charging people to use the service; if you charge a reasonably low rate (like $1 per gift), that will not deter people away from using it. If I were the developer of Honesty Box, I would have employed this from its inception. The notion that the entire Internet economy should be supported by AdSense and Amazon.com referral links is wrong. In addition by making your service exclusive to paying users, you will help keep your costs down.Make sure you incorporate a free demo to a number of users during your initial opening, or keep a free, limited version of your service around for the sake of enticing users to users to your subscription or free based service.
• Get Relevant SponsorsIf you run an application dedicated to sharing your favorite Entourage quotes or Lost theories, getting a sponsorship advertisements for either of those shows is a no brainer. Users who have that app would probably be interesting in clicking on an advertisement for either of those shows; the hard part is getting the ads in the first place!

If you have any suggestions, please leave them here. I have more ideas on monetization ideas but they’re just so good that I need to keep them for myself :p. Stay tuned for when I release my own application in the upcoming months

1. Go to the page that is used for creating a fan page. Click here to go to that page. The url is:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

2. You will see three categories:

a. Local

b. Brand, Product or Organization

c. Artist, Band or Public Figure

Select the category that is right for you. For example, if you are a website owner, select “b” and then from the drop down menu select Website.

3. Type in the name of your business

4. Check the box that says: “I am authorized to create this page” and type in your name in the “Electronic Signature” text box area underneath it.

5. Now, you will be taken to a page which will have tabs for “Wall”, “Info”, “Photo” and “Discussions”. It will also have a place for you to upload a picture. Upload the logo of your business.

6. You will also see an alert on this page which says: “This page has not been published. To make this Page public, click on the link that says “publish this page”.  Click on this and make your page go live. It is that simple. It’s also a good idea to be a fan of your own page. Once you are done, you can send this page to friends on your list and ask them to do the same.

Online social networking is the future and FaceBook is on the cutting edge of this media. There is a reason why FaceBook is valued at 10 billion dollars even in the recession, so start taking advantage of this great social networking tool and grow your online business today!

FOR FURTHER ASSISTANCE YOU CAN CONTACT AT WWW.SOCIALMEDIAHOME.COM

Facebook Fan Pages have been around for some time now. Yet, it is only recently that you could personalise the URL’s for both your Personal Profile and Business Fan pages. Facebook has also added several new features to these pages, which bring additional benefits for business. We would like to share with you these benefits, along with simple instructions to create your own fan page.

SITE TRAFFIC

Consider the following;

Facebook is currently ranked the #1 Social Network in the US and the 4th most visited site on The Internet by Alexa, with over 70 million unique visitors in May 2009 (source comScore).  With this in mind it is clear that there is more likely-hood of people visiting and revisiting your site via your fan page updates than directly. As with email, people log in to Facebook at various times during the day, to stay up-to-date with what is happening in “their world” – others have it open all day.

Facebook allows users to Comment, Like & Share any update, link, photo, video etc. This has the opportunity to turn viral depending on the popularity or interest in the subject. To take this further you can send your updates over to twitter via the RSS feed using Twitterfeed syndicating your information to another top 20 ranked website.

Facebook have also just added a great new widget for your fan page which you can add to your website or blog. It allows visitors to become a fan, directly from your site. You can also customise the information you wish to share on the widget eg, your updates and/or your fans, or simply the “Become a Fan” button. This is valuable as it gives visitors another way of returning indirectly to your website. You can access the widget via the link under your logo image on the top left of your fan page.

BRANDING

• Personalising or branding your Facebook URLs aka “Vanity URLs”.  Easy to remember and simple to share;

Facebook.com/yourname or businessname

v

Facebook.com/?ref=tn/profile.php?id=xxxxxxx

• Currently you must have 100 fans before you can create a vanity URL – decreasing the chance of someone ’squatting’ on your brand.
  
• If you do not have a website, your Facebook fan page could be used as an alternative to a website or blog (get a domain name from GoDaddy and re-point to your fan page, for a more professional feel). If you do have a website or blog your fan page could be a great extension to it.
• The process of becoming a fan is simplified – NO friend request to be ‘accepted’ or to view your page. Just the decision to become a fan and at the click of a mouse the avenue of communication is open to you both.

BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS WITH YOUR FAN BASE

As we will always will state, it is so important with social media to build strong relationships with your fan base/customers – So start the communication and let them know your;

• Latest News/Events & Product Launches
• Exclusive Offers for your Facebook Fans
• Share your latest blog posts via RSS
• Market research – get feedback directly from your customers and stay on the pulse of what they want.

Keep the communication regular and make sure you are conversational and not just a one way street.

ANALYTICS

To quote directly from Facebook;

Facebook allows you to engage with your fans in more ways than ever before – and Insights now allows you to dive into the context of those interactions with deep analytics.

We now show you how users are interacting with your page, broken down by Wall posts, likes and comments. Your Post Quality shows you how engaging your posts are to your fans, and your star rating compares your Post Quality to other pages of similar size.

Your Fans Over Time graph now lets you track when users decide to unsubscribe from your posts in their News Feed. And we now provide statistics on where your fan base is located and which languages they speak.

If you are anything like me and don’t want to mix your personal interactions with your business interactions on FaceBook, then a FaceBook Fan Page may be just what you need. FaceBook offers many ways of interacting with your online prospects and customers and one of the most innovative ways I have learned to do this is by creating a FaceBook Fan Page. This Fan Page will be strictly for your online business and it will keep your interactions geared towards your business contacts. Below I give some ways to use the FaceBook Fan page to grow your business.

1. Integrate with RSS.

You can integrate this fan page with the RSS feed on your website and ensure that it has a steady stream of content.

2. Build Custom Applications:

You can build custom applications for this page based on your business and needs of your customers.

3. Announce Events:

If you are having a free give-away or are going to review a new product, then you can announce that event on your fan page and create anticipation for it.

4. Explain You’re Business:

A lot of webmasters use the fan page to include graphics about the sections of their websites and how various users can use them. This serves as a good tool to introduce people to sections of your website that they might be interested in.

5. Interact:

When your fan page reaches a critical mass of fans – you will find that they are interacting with each other and giving you great feedback and word of mouth advertising. This is invaluable and although it takes a little time to build, once done – it is the greatest asset you can have.

1. Branding - Facebook can be a great resource for generating brand awareness. Facebook is becoming popular amongst various age demographics and can be a create interception point for building your relationship with you consumers and prospects.
2. Customer Engagement - Using Facebook applications can be a great way for communicating promotions, contest and events. Again it is another interception point that can be leveraged to entice consumer engagement with your brand, your products or your service.
3. Drive Web Traffic - Facebook can act as a portal point for driving traffic to your site and other online properties.
4. Reputation Management - can be a useful tool for seeing what users are saying about you and your brand. In addition yourFacebook profile can now be indexed in the search results and as a result can provide another favorable listing in the organic search results of the engines.
5. New Customer Acquisition - Facebook provides an opportunity to find consumers you may have not otherwise discovered.
6. Lead Generation - Similar to the previous point is that Facebook can act as another potential lead gen tool that can be used to qualify leads. Reviewing potential prospects' profiles may help you build a relationship with your prospects and aid in the lead generation qualifying process.
7. Client Retention - provides another potential interception point to build the relationship with your consumer.
8. Access to the social world and it’s inherent value - aka the cool factor. You never know who is using Facebook. Consider the following scenario: a potential prospect could be doing research on your brand or organization and may use Facebook to see if you have a presence there. Then they see that you have a Facebook profile and see a number of positive posts about your brand. This in turn can shape their sphere of influence and could end up being one of many deciding factors as to why the prospect selects you over another vendor. The perception that Facebook is "IN" and the fact that you are using Facebook could help influence their perception of your brand. Having said that, there are still may who are anti-Facebook so it could also affect the perception about your brand. The fact remains is that Facebook continues to gain popularity and it is not going away anytime soon.
9. The Viral Effect - Take word Of mouth to a whole new level. Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd... Facebook is attracting quite a crowd.
10. Feedback Mechanism - Using Facebook and the various applications available can help you understand consumer behavior based on the sharing of content and commentary on the social networking site.
11. Build Business Use Cases - Facebook can provide you with an opportunity to build successful business cases as you target specific vertical markets with specific business objectives.

There have been other social networks and media sites that have had limited success in terms of promotion and creating brand awareness. With the amount of existing and new applications that are being created on Facebook, business owners have an opportunity to use Facebook to promote their brand even further. The above points illustrate that there is benefit for organizations who use Facebook. It may not be the tool or medium that many would first think of to promote their brand, but judging by the surging popularity, Facebook is not that bad of a place to create awareness of your brand.

Top Facebook Applications

Top Facebook Application Developers

Fastest Growing Facebook Applications

Worst Facebook Applications

Facebook has officially released Facebook Widgets to the public. A variety of widgets have already been released by Facebook, with new widgets likely to be available in the near future.

The main advantage of widgets is the ability to easily and quickly integrate powerful Facebook features such as Facebook Connect without having to know the technical programming behind in the integration of such Facebook applications.

The widget site currently has 5 different widgets across 2 general categories. The categories include Personal Profile Widgets and Website or Business Widgets.

Personal Profile:

1. Profile Badge
2. Photo Badge

Website or Business:

1. Fan Box
2. Live Stream Box
3. Page Badge

Check out detailed information about the Facebook Widgets
http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/index.php

If you wanna link Twitter account to Facebook so that your Facebook status updates sync? Easy, here’s how:

Step One: You have to Search for “Twitter” in Facebook’s search field.

Step Two: There should be first result which you are looking for. It is the application “Twitter.” Click “view application”

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