Using Facebook to help with Internet Marketing

We all know that social ranking signals are becoming more and more important when it comes to ensuring that content is able to rank on the SERPs, but that doesn’t mean that all of your efforts should be entirely focused on gaining likes and followers. With a bit of technical know-how and a great idea the Facebook Development Platform gives you a great basis from which to gain leads, sales and recognition.

The great idea part of this is the toughest, and completely up to you, so to demonstrate how powerful the platform can be I’m going to use a real world example that I’ve personally been involved in along with high level tips for repeating my success.

At the end of 2008, and just as Facebook games were taking off, I created an application that allows you to adopt a virtual pet. Unlike the PetVilles of the modern world, this was a static app with text and images. Within a few weeks we’d gone from 0 to 30,000 daily users, which soon grew to a massive 150,000 within a few months. The game is still going today and has over 3 million installs.

But what does this mean and how can it help with SEO?

Put simply, this is all about the data that you gain when a user installs your application. Before I continue, one thing to remember here is that you must keep within Facebook’s terms of service, along with any local and international SPAM legislation. Abuse of this can get you in lots of trouble, so please, please, (please) be good!

So, let’s think about Facebook games. When you first add the application you’re asked to grant it permission to access your data. This could include access to your news feed, status, or what we’re interested in – your email address.

Once you’re logged in, most games use virtual currency that you spend inside the application – whether that is food for your pet, or decoration for its home. Some of this currency is awarded just for logging in, but there’s almost without exception the principle of premium items that can only be gained by spending your hard earned cash, taking surveys, or signing up for offers.

If you put these together, generating traffic for a related site is relatively straightforward.

Although our application has been around for a relatively long time, there are still over 50,000 users logging in each month. Just as importantly, out of our 3 million users we have just over 500,000 that have given us access to their email address. It’s therefore very easy to create relevant content and push it to a massive audience using a very simple workflow.

Incentivising users with a few extra premium credits for visiting and sharing, along with including your fantastic new content in an email newsletter brings guaranteed social interaction and increased visibility.

A prime example would be a dog-related infographic. Creating this and pushing it through the application to our users generated a few thousand Facebook Likes, along with a bucket load of tweets and shares through Google+. This also acted a seed for an extended marketing campaign that generated around 100 links to our retail site.

How do you do the same thing?

This is really dependent on the site that you’re looking to push users to but creating an application that’s fun and simple is the way to start. It’s not as easy as it used to be to get an application to succeed but the potential benefits are huge. Done properly it’ll pay for itself as you sell virtual currency but will also give you a loyal user-base from which to base SEO and link building campaigns.

Matt Beswick offers Web Design and SEO in Milton Keynes, along with running Pet365 – a UK supplier of dog coats, collars, and beds.