Companies don’t need facebook pages anymore (part 2)

This is the second and last part of this blog post. Read part 1 here.

Facebook is like a shark that never stops moving , and marketers can barely keep up. A few months ago, Facebook announced their plans for world domination (I might be editorializing a little), and two new technologies in support of this goal.

Facebook’s Open Graph and Social Plugins

Central to this effort is the Open Graph Protocol, a new way to index web pages that require participating web publishers to add additional descriptive metadata to their pages. Facebook, in turn, uses the pages’ metadata to better categorize their subject matter (e.g. does it represent a product, a person, an article, etc.?) as well as determine editorial ownership to the page.

With these metadata in place, Facebook may categorize external sites with the same level of detail as business pages on Facebook itself. This can come in handy when users are searching for content, products, or brands while on Facebook. (Read: Ultimately visitors won’t have to jump off to Google…). In the meantime, you can search-optimize yourself on Facebook instead.

That said, Facebook’s ambitions go far beyond indexing web pages. What has made Facebook such a powerful marketing platform is their knowledge of how individuals are connected to others (a.k.a. the “Social Graph”) and their connections/affinity to Facebook Pages (which represent brands, products, causes, etc.).

The second part of Facebook’s world domination scheme is a system that indexes Facebook users’ affinity with external web pages. This goal is realized by means of Facebook’s new Social Plugins.

There’s nothing like the “Like” button

The most important of these plugins is Facebook’s (in)famous “Like” button, which publishers may now place on their own (external) pages. The Like button is personalized to the visitor with content from Facebook, offering a view into which friends have liked or commented on the page. New visitors may also click the Like button to show their affinity to, or approval of, the page’s subject matter, and in the process share content with their friends on Facebook and with new visitors to the web page. This in turn will drive traffic back to your website (which has proven to be the case for many sites).

Your new Facebook Fan page is your website

What you might not realize is that by adding Open Graph metadata to a web page and associating a Like button with it, you have, in fact, created a new Facebook “Fan” page on your own site. Just like with business pages on Facebook, you can query Facebook for aggregate demographic data on page Fans along with the opportunity to push messages to Fans’ newsfeeds.

Consumer acceptance

I bet most visitors who “Liked” a piece of web content did not realize they also implicitly granted the publisher permission to publish to their Facebook newsfeeds. Smart publishers will treat this permission like gold, and be careful to not spam the user with irrelevant content, but rather see this as an opportunity to further grow Fans’ affinity and their propensity to share the brand with their friends.

Uniquely addressable audiences

In fact, there is no reason at all to send visitors irrelevant updates. If you have put a Like button on 1,000 products in your web store (which you now can), you’re cultivating 1,000 uniquely addressable audiences. Now you are able to send promotions to users who like organic meats separately from visitors who like energy efficient kitchen appliances. The ability to cultivate and communicate Fans at a very granular level is extremely powerful (and the most revolutionary marketing technology since Google Adwords)!

It’s what Zuckerberg wants, so let him have it

This move to bring Facebook functionality to external sites is where Facebook is putting its focus now, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

And they are succeeding: As of June 2010, more 300,000 sites have already implemented the plugins since they were released on April, 21 with more than 150 million people engage with Facebook on external websites every month.

If you can only get over the fact that Facebook just took over the web and revolutionized permission based marketing overnight (granted, in order to boost their own traffic and ad revenue), prepare yourself to take advantage of the tools that Facebook has given you.

Start by making your own web page the next Facebook Fan page. In fact, make a 1,000 Fan pages. Why wouldn’t you?

Ps. I’ve started a Group on LinkedIn for people interested in discussing Facebook Open Graph Strategies. Feel free to join.