Facebook Messages

Last week, Facebook announced “Facebook Messages”, a new way of communicating on the internet. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, has famously stated that "[He doesn't] think a modern messaging system is going to be e-mail" and Facebook have made a huge move from a social networking website to an entirely new communications platform.

The new platform, which takes on the likes of AOL, Gmail and Yahoo (amongst other email providers), gives users the ability to create an @facebook email address and not only has the same functionality as email messaging but also implements instant messaging and chat.

However, Zuckerberg has announced that "This is not an e-mail killer, we don't expect anyone to wake up tomorrow and say they are going to shut down [their current e-mail accounts].”

What does this mean?

From a social marketing perspective, what this means is obvious:

Users are going to be spending more time in one place. This place being Facebook.

Facebook is already the most visited site on the web, so the implementation of these new features means that people will be spending even more time on this platform because of the convenience of having everything all in one place rather than in multiple places.

Whilst this may not be great news for guys like Yahoo and AOL who still boast their instant messaging platforms, chat and email services, it is great for social media marketers – it’s the perfect opportunity to increase promotion on Facebook.

Here are a few suggestions of what you should be doing:

• Improving your Facebook Page so that it’s more informative and fun for users.
• Increasing the traffic to your Facebook Page from other sources, so more people are aware that it exists and people use it.
• Interacting more than users so they’re more likely to visit the page.
• Using the fantastic Facebook Ad service to get more users to your page.

Overall, these should increase your brand presence on the site as a whole and be very valuable when Facebook rolls out the service.

Written by Jason John Mills