1. Facebook, new sales tool?

Are you joining in Facebook? Having fun with it?

Since early last year, concepts of web 2.0 eras have become widely known among the overall society. It was particularly welcomed in business industry. This is because that there are blogs, characterized by three points open, share, participation. And this can be applied to several marketing tools by using the power of word of mouth through blogs.

However, this huge stream cooled down after a quite while though; there are continuous attempts to apply the impact of this powerful online social network to marketing. Similarly, Facebook, worldwide popular hangout, is tested to see if it works as an effective way to promote products.

A huge word of mouth on the online, Facebook

People who were so disappointed by MySpace, which was the top social network hardly overtaken by competitors until Facebook ranked top, mostly moved their personal blogs to Facebook.

Facebook currently has more than 67 million active users. Besides, this rapid growth has been accelerating since Jan. 2007. If you take a closer look at the statistics on its website, it shows us how rapidly this network has been expanding; it is so evident that Facebook is really a vast social network.

Based on those facts, using Facebook as a lucrative way to generate profit in terms of marketing appears fairly possible as well.

Market Lodge, purchase program by recommendation inside social network

The latest article published in Business week on March 13th, tells of how this idea is put into practice. According to the article, Facebook has turned out to be a better place for promoting products by putting more commerce into the platform.

In the centre of that, there is the merchandise programme called Market Lodge. This programme basically will pay Facebook members a 10 percent commission for all sales made on their recommendations. Whole concept underlay a very simple physiological factor of customer’s purchase decision-making. That is, customers are likely to be influenced by the others’ recommendation when they buy goods.

How Facebook sales can make profit?

Here is a link to read original copy of article.

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8VCB4900.htm

Throughout the article, you can see how this programme makes profit from it. Only 4 steps are needed for start up!

1. Anyone can do it! - Customize your own markets

2. Just select your whatever you like to sell - from a wide range of products sold by about 50 different merchants.

3. Invite your people in the networks - get them to check out stuff you are arranging and recommending

Plus, they don’t need to deal with the whole process of business ranging from doing inventories, order management and delivery service. It will be handled by merchants.

This is seemingly very simple to make money. Yet, it clearly shows how strong and influential power social network has with the example of Facebook.

To be successful? : Need to find out the right marketing mix for this

Others’ view on the future of this is fairly positive. Conifer, Colo.-based bSocial bet its financial incentive. Nevertheless, It seems far away to go. There are still challenges and hindrances in developing a possible marketing tool into a practically utilized alternative.

It seems to depend on how successful this program will advance. That is because, it is true that social network websites has huge potential of money generator with huge floating population. Whereas they have been having so much trouble such as finding the right marketing mix and reaping huge profits from advertising.

From these points, they require further practices for coming up with the suitable marketing strategy so that it can continue to grow and not stopping at this stage due to failure in finding out the solution.

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