Social networks are a crucial tool for businesses to build brand awareness and interact with their consumers – without this availability businesses lose points with their audience. Facebook in particular has made a number of improvements to prove value for businesses to spend time and money on their platform in order for them to see tangiible results.
The most recent of these changes came Thursday (January 31st) when Facebook announced the arrival of the Facebook Card – a gift card that allows friends to send a receive a physical Facebook Card to use on Facebook commerce stores. The Facebook Card can hold many different gift cards and manages the balances from the various stores. Users can also manage their Facebook Card accounts from the web or from the mobile app.
The cards are reusable as Facebook explains: “After you’ve received a card, the next time you get a Facebook Card gift, it will instantly be added to your existing card.” The cards will “roll out gradually to people in the US” but Facebook gives no clear date of release.
In combination with the recentgraph search Facebook announced, the Facebook Card shows the trend that the company is following to make the platform more profitable for the businesses and brands that use it. A few months ago, brand and businesses were loosing faith in Facebook advertisements seeing no real results from spending money.
With the addition of these new tools that have been built into the social media giant, businesses have much more to gain fro the platform. Users can search the social network to find products and brands that friends and family have used with the graph search – a tool that is especially important since users are more likely to buy from a company that a friend has recommended. Facebook Cards will create an easy way for these social recommendations to turn into sales.
Integrating this new commerce platform on Facebook gives huge potential to businesses. The brand loyalty and engagement that so many companies have been building on social platforms can now translate to – what is hopefully easy to use – social commerce. Once the product is officially available to Facebook users, it will be interesting to see how they react to it. Since users can manage gift cards to so many different stores, Facebook Cards have potential to usurp space from traditional gift cards. Depending on how businesses work with the social network and what offers they allow to their users, Facebook may have taken a huge step in clearly proving value for businesses on their platform.
Contact Wild Frog Studio to develop a successful social media marketing strategy.