Facebook As The Village Shop

It seems to me that Facebook has brought the whole sterile internet marketing world full circle and back, amazingly, to the internet as a version of the village shop.

The only difference now is that you don't actually have to put your wellies on and trudge through the snow (topical reference to our current weather!) to the shop in order either to speak to the shop owner, hear his or her messages or get their latest offer.

No, the village shop is now available on your PC via the Facebook Page of any and every business every one of which can aim to become the equivalent of your village shop because of the intimacy and convenience and you will always find your friends there and feel comfortable.

The Facebook Page has evolved rapidly from a vehicle for the indie band to foster their relationship with their fans, hence the common name of 'Fan Page', into the must have accessory for any business.  Indeed, there is every reason to believe that businesses should not even be treating them as accessories but as the hard core centre of their marketing effort.

The development of internet technology to include audio and video has already created the potential to personalise the marketing process and to bring it closer to the most effective selling environment of being 'face to face' with your prospect.  Add to that the 2 great advantages of the internet for marketing purposes of speed and automation and you still only have a technology with potential.  A message platform that still needs that magic ingredient of reaching potential customers, aka traffic generation, to become truly effective.

This is the magic ingredient that the Facebook Page adds to the mix.  Being able to persuade Friends to become Fans so that you can automatically reach out to all their Friends – who may well have the same interests and are therefore better 'qualified' for your community than the average internet traffic.  Being able to carry audio and video directly on Facebook to create the personal intimacy of the village shop.

Then during this last year there have been 2 features added that are exploding the relevance of Facebook to businesses.  First is the ability to put that ubiquitous 'Like' button on pretty well any web real estate in order to accumulate yet more Fans. Second is the launch of Facebook's new messaging system incorporating the functions of email, SMS, IM and everything in between.

Think about that.  Facebook has put itself out onto every other platform on the web via the Like button.  Then it has brought every other form of it's users communication in house onto Facebook.  Whatever concerns users might have about Facebook the ultimate convenience of having their entire online life in one place is bound to bring yet more users into Facebooks fold.

That's enough of the theory, now for a bit of 'wow' time. Take a look at this image.

Facebook relationships

Click this link for the high-res version for maximum wow factor and visit Facebook's blog for the full story.

This is an entirely artificial image created by drawing a line between the locations of all the users who have relationships on Facebook.  Produced by an intern at Facebook the astonishing thing about it is how closely it resembles the real world in places – and not in others.

Remember there is no map underneath this.  What you see is entirely relationship lines – and yet it is a startlingly accurate depiction of a map of the world.

Yet at the same time it reminds us that large parts of our globe are very sparsely inhabited – and that there are also large parts of our globe with enormous populations who do not have the benefit of building relationships with the outside world.

Some related posts about the growth and impact of Facebook

• Marketing Data RoundUp: BI for the smartphone | Facebook elbows aside Yahoo (marketingvox.com)
• Being Random is Relevant on Facebook and Twitter (marketingconversation.com)
• The DOs & DON'Ts of Facebook Commerce [TNW Social Media] (thenextweb.com)