After each new post on this site, there is a natural spike in traffic from those who have subscribed to this site via RSS. Traffic increases again significantly when I tag items for facebook newsfeeds. So much so, that it’s now part of my post-publish routine. Friends and colleagues more often refer to my “facebook feeds” than their own RSS feeds.

Call it the natural beacon effect?

Whatever you want to call it, as a blogger or marketer you need to incorporate a facebook strategy as part of your overall marcom plan. 

Blogger tip: Add social bookmarking to your blog template so that people can tag your article to their favorite tool. Also include a twitter push so that everytime an article is published you will automatically tweet your followers with link.

Here are the latest stats from facebook as noted from last week’s Toronto breakfast on their enhanced marketing platform:

1. 1 in 4 Canadians (or 8 million) are now active users. There are 57 million active users worldwide
2. 65,000 new users in Canada added each day on average
3. 12 billion page views on facebook in Canada every month
4. Average Canadian views 62 pages on facebook on each visit
5. 65% of Canadians go to the site at least once a day – compared to 54% in the rest of the world

Other interesting tid bits…

1. It took the ilike application 4 days to get 1 million users to install their application on facebook. This demonstrates the power and reach of building an application that is relevant to users
2. There are now over 80 applications with at least 1 million users
3. Applications are not advertised – people find out about them through the mini-feed

Currently facebook insights (their marketing dashboard page), beacon, pages, and social ads are not supported on their mobile platform. Look for updates to the mobile platform to incorporate these new services in 2008.

The biggest complaint I had about the facebook Ad / flyer program was the inability to target specific user attributes beyond their subscribed network.  Metrics were weak and performance was well below industry standard for banner ads.

Enter Social Ads. Launched last month, marketers can now target users very specifically – or on pretty much any attribute found in their profile.  Expect clickthrough rates to improve.

Social Ads are also a bit controversial. Your social actions are now fair game.  Now when you create a facebook beacon on blockbuster for example, facebook could serve an Ad that matches your social action. The Ad is published in your newsfeed and therefore will be visible to your entire social network of friends, family, and vague acquaintances.

What makes this controversial is that you now appear to be an advocate or  spokesperson for the brand, product, or service that appears in your newsfeed.

Call it the celebrity effect.

Just as people are influenced by their favorite sports hero or movie actor, facebook assumes that you have your own celebrity status within your social network. It’s like adding spam to word of mouth marketing. I can’t imagine that tasting very good.  This type of non-endorsed sponsorship is bound to turn some facebook users concerned about privacy into badvocates.   

Now here’s a nifty idea – pay your facebook celebrities.  

Treat users like the celebrities that they are within their social network and pay them a nominal fee each time a social ad is served in their newsfeed. It would be just like adding Google ad sense to your blog or website. Its only made Google a few billion dollars – so that model is already proven.

Here’s another nifty idea – instead of paying cash, reward users with points.

Reward facebook users with points for being advocates and spokespeople and allow them to redeem for merchandise from sponsors…or for invitations to special events… or special applications or status within facebook. Or how about redeeming those points for travel? Who needs Air Miles now! 

If the loyalty program is designed correctly, facebook could have the most powerful loyalty program in the world overnight.

I would be an advocate of that program.

A month ago I presented an overview of social networking as a marketing platform to a Canadian Bank as way for them to reach different customers differently. 

In Canada that conversation will almost always become a conversation about facebook….which it was.

Last week I was invited to attend a morning presentation in downtown Toronto for an overview of facebook’s improved marketing platform.  Suddenly 50% of my last presentation was out of date.  It’s a good thing I took notes… notes that I will share with you this week.

If you’ve been underwelmed at the flexibility, reporting, and performance of facebook ads (flyers) and sponsored groups, I’ve got great news for you – four new marketing tools from facebook look promising with new relevance, insight, and flexibility unseen before in a social networking site.      

Like the facebook newsfeed when it launched a year ago, the new beacon product has generated a lot of discussion in the blogsphere and in the general media over the past few weeks over it’s interpretation of consumer privacy. 

Newsfeed is the most important tool on facebook for creating and maintaining the social graph. Beacon has the potential to have a greater impact. With beacon, you will now know what your friends are up to…outside of facebook.

It works like this – you go to your favorite website not named facebook and do something. That something can now get posted to your facebook newsfeed. For example, if you were to post an item on ebay for auction, that action and item with a link back to ebay will appear in your newsfeed. Now your entire social network knows you have an item posted on ebay.  

There’s only been one problem.

facebook made this “feature” opt-out.  Having an opt-out policy is marketing code for “we can SPAM you or what you do until you tell us to stop.” Since you actually asked for it, you are in fact sending a steady diet of facebook bacn to your facebook social network.  

Since most of us have short attention spans and rarely read or notice opt-out clauses, you end up broadcasting things you probably didn’t want broadcasted – like when your mother notices that you are selling last year’s Christmas present on ebay. Ooops.  Should we call that re-gifting 2.0? I’ll leave that one alone.

This past Friday, facebook updated the rules around beacon to “opt-in” – meaning you need to click to give facebook permission to publish that action in your newsfeed. This change aligns beacon with accepted practices employed today in other channels such as email.  

Marketers managing consumer brands take note – it’s super easy to add beacons to your existing web properties. It’s as easy as adding three lines of code to enable your product or service to be promoted virally through the social graph on facebook.  Want more info? Do a google search or start here.

facebook Social ads go a step further.   That will be the topic of my next article.