I attended a very informative presentation from Marcus Wareham, Head of Planning & Strategy EMEA at Facebook this morning. We saw the usual stats showing how big Facebook has become (half a billion users, 700 billion minutes every month, 50% log on every day etc.) and this gave me a chance to reflect on how marketers are now exploiting the world’s leading social network. I also took the opportunity to chat with some other brand owners to see how they are embracing the social web and we all seem to be grappling with very similar issues, like these:
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How should we resource for social media and how can we ensure our people can scale as the network grows?
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How should international brands best represent themselves on Facebook. Should they have one page per country/region or one global page?
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If you’re a house of brands (like Kellogg’s, Unilever or Microsoft) how should you best present yourself on Facebook? Is it best to have one network for each brand you own, or one network covering all brands?
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How will Facebook’s web-wide ‘Like’ mechanism affect brands in the long term? Will ‘liking’ a brand or group or idea become so easy it’s almost a passive gesture, at which point what’s the value to brands?
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How do we best manage unofficial brand pages and groups to bring them into line with our official presence on Facebook?
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Will Facebook’s belief that search engines will be superseded by people sharing information come to fruition, and what does this mean for my SEA/SEO marketing programmes in the long term?
Please let me know your thoughts. How are you using Facebook in your marketing programmes? What works for you and what questions remain unanswered?
Image courtesy of Maxo