Micro Portals on Facebook
Before I dive into why I think micro-portals on Facebook will be huge, a little info about what FB is currently doing with Open Graph.
Users can now ‘Like’ pages across the web. Facebook and the publisher can both track the no. of likes happening on a particular website.
I’ll use the example of Zapak.com for this.
How does Zapak and Facebook use this?
Almost all our Game pages have some meta data for OG (Open Graph)..
Eg:
<meta property=”og:title” content=”Zapak.com - Pool Mania”/>
<meta property=”og:url” content=”http://www.zapak.com/Pool-Mania-games-int-1200-3.php”/>
<meta property=”og:site_name” content=”Zapak” />
<meta property=”og:description” content=”Take aim and shoot, Pot as many balls as you can in the given time.”/>
<meta property=”fb:app_id” content=”361271476444”/>
Facebook will have the no. of likes this particular page has received along with the frequency data.
How does this help Zapak?
If a user happens to search for ‘Pool Mania’ on Facebook, he’ll get a link which on-clicking will take the user directly to the game on Zapak.
In short - SEO’ing on Facebook.
Notice the small right pointing triangle in the link? That basically signifies that the link is outside Facebook.
Now as a publisher, I’m happy. This might get me quite a few visits from Facebook. But something which it does, which a user might not like…is that it takes the user away from Facebook.
Now this brings me to micro-portals on Facebook having a very bright future. Social Media Marketing is now something every Brand Manager has to look into. But marketing on the social medium is not simply about having a facebook page. All the conversations about your brand won’t happen on your fan page.
So where does a micro-portal on Facebook come in?
Imagine you own a modest hotel in a touristy place in India and want people to know about you? The ideal place to reach out to users would be on Travel forums. On facebook the ideal place will be travel groups / pages / apps. Same thing about treks and camps.
Auto segment - You’ve launched a new bike/car and spent a decent amount of money in creating a 3D game around it. Now launching it on facebook as an app will mean starting from 0 users. Why not add it to an application which already has around 100k active users?
(This is what we’ve done at Zapak - http://apps.facebook.com/zapakgames)
A new cookery show on your channel?
Reach out to users using a popular food destination on facebook.
And the more you think..
You’ll realise that every brand will want conversations around it not only on their fan-pages but also on other forums on Facebook. Which will definitely increase the reach multi-fold.
Now if BollywoodHungama were the make an entire version of their site on Facebook, I’m sure there would be a lot more discussions pertaining to every movie on the app and all future movies woulds also want to market on their bollywood micro-portal, mainly because the eyeballs and the activity would already be there.
It is content which is going to drive the next wave of social media. Fanpages for brands will soon be a passé. Products will use the advertorial/advertisement route via popular micro-portals on Facebook. Soon we’ll see dotcoms have a FB micro-portal strategy. News channels should definitely be the ones to move quickly to Facebook along with the cricket websites. Invest in building a destination within Facebook - where a user doesn’t have to leave the network and go to your site. He can consume, comment and share all at the same destination. You no longer have to ask him to use FB Connect and then push something on to his wall…These things will start happening automatically and your content consumption rate will increase too.
