The Real Facebook ‘Eldorado’
So far, we’ve looked in detail at most of the new advertising initiatives that Facebook has recently introduced such as Social Ads, Pages and Beacon, and concluded that, at least at this moment, there is probably not a great deal of money being made.
There is one aspect of Facebook, however, where there certainly is money being made, and quite large amounts of it too.
This is in the area of creating what are known as ‘applications’ for Facebook.
These are best described as additional third party software programs or modules that can be added to your Facebook profile or home pages to add functionality or simplify matters.
So, when we were looking at making your Online Store page as attractive as possible, it was suggested that you should add video and picture applications as one step towards doing so.
Applications for Facebook have been around for quite some time now, and with the recent creation of the F8 platform, application development has take another significant step forward.
Developers are now able to create applications that are readily and easily integrated into Facebook because they have been given access to the same source code that Facebook themselves use.
This clearly makes it far easier to build the applications that will then enable users to interact with their associates, friends and your business much more easily.
So, how does this allow the application creator to make money?
Take a look at this page of some of the most popular current applications that are available.
The first listed application here has been downloaded by over four and a half million users!
And every one of those users has been shown the application developers ‘Page’ at least one time! That is 4.5 million potential advert views driven by the creation of one simple little application!
So, how can that make money?
Here’s an example. Note that the third most popular application is called ’Causes’.
This is, as the name might suggest, an application that enables you to help your favorite charity or cause.
Causes are very ‘big’ on Facebook, which again fits well with the image of the average Facebook user that we have already built.
See, the big, big secret to Facebook advertising success is making sure that your advertising looks like anything but advertising. Do this well, and you can make money.
Here’s an example.
Find a cause that has universal appeal. For example, a charity supporting action against breast cancer would work.
Create an application, and on the Page that gets shown when it is added by a Facebook community member, add a toolbar for free download.
Monetize this toolbar with an attractive CPA offer that will pay you a $1 for every download of the toolbar that will then sit on the user’s desktop carrying that promoter’s advertising.
Pledge to give $150 to the breast cancer charity in question for every 1000 toolbars that are downloaded.
So, you make $1000 for every thousand toolbars downloaded and you pay $150 of that to the charity (cause) of your choice.
The net result is that the charity gets a nice little present for doing nothing and you get to pocket $850!
And, guess what?
This is no hypothetical scenario.
It actually happened a couple of years ago - and one and a half million toolbars were downloaded in the space of one week!
Does that seem like good money to you?
I would think that it probably does.
After all, $850,000 in one week for building one tiny application and a bit of creative thinking is not too bad, is it?
So, the key is thinking in what used to be called a lateral manner (i.e. sideways) and is nowadays called ‘out of the box’.
By now, I hope that this series of articles on Facebook has given you at least an inkling of the kind of users that you are dealing with at Facebook.
Generally (and, of course, this is an extremely broad generalisation) your average Facebook community member will be an educated person with a social conscience.
This is going to be someone that intrinsically wants to help others, who is at the same time extremely resistant to ‘ordinary’ advertising.
So, what can you do that will appeal to this individual?
Now, of course, the first step is to get your page in front of that community member so that they are in a position to take advantage of your offer.
What you need to come up with is an idea for a great application, but you do not have to come up with something that is totally original or world shattering.
Simply look at all of the applications that are already working, and see how you can improve them.
Remember that the Japanese built one of the world’s most successful car making industries based entirely on that theory, so it has been done before, and there is little doubt that it works.
Then, apply a lot more thought to what your killer ‘advertising, but not advertising’ offer should be.
What cause can you support, and how can you monetise your efforts?
Or, perhaps you might like to think of this as another money making idea.
A friend recently sold two applications for $19000 each.
He freely admits that if he had the patience to hang around then he could probably have got twice this amount, but he was happy enough with the quick sale of a couple of applications that took half a days work each to create, and were around a year old in both cases!
What he is sold here were not applications. They are nothing more than essentially worthless snippets of computer code.
What he sold was the fact that as a result of the popularity of these applications, thousands or millions of new visitors would be forced to view an advertising Page.
So, applications are a superbly effective way of making certain that your Page gets seen, hence the sales value that they have.
At this point in time, ‘applications’ is definitely the best and most effective way of making good money from Facebook.
Psst!...Have you Heard the Buzz?
