I have owed this post for quite some time and this week’s industry news around Edgerank and Facebook’s algorithm reminded me that I had this one in the pipeline. I figured given recent events marketers and businesses either already using Facebook or planning to do so will find the post useful.

Be warned that this post is specifically targeted at ecommerce business that may already have Facebook fan pages, however the approach is very much useful to any other businesses with online presence that may want to consider targeting multiple territories without necessarily over complicating their existing site. With that said and with no further ado, I shall explain the concept in hand.

So we have established that you may be a successful retailer with growing sales and you have noticed an increasing number of sales and enquiries from overseas. Perhaps you have distributors or resellers in these territories, in that instance you have already considered expansion and spoken to your web development company. If you got that far I would have expected you to get a quote which might have made you fall off your chair. At this point you have probably decided not to proceed and, had you not, you would still need to consider other costs such as SEO, hosting, translation of your content and possibly PPC to get it off the ground.

With all that in mind why dive directly into a multilingual site?  Why not test the water and evaluate what the audience response to your product, service and brand on the designated territory might be?

So why not use a platform with existing global capabilities like Facebook? If you don’t already have presence this may be a daunting task, however Facebook can be a good entry point into the multilingual arena. A great example is Clarin’s Facebook page there you can see on the bottom left hand corner they have links to other Facebook pages specific to territories. On each regional page, as one would have expected, the content served is targeted to the native language of that territory, improving the overall local user experience. To encourage some more interaction without having to go down the road of immediate interaction (which would be required in the long term) with your localised page, you could also try using Facebook shopping. For those who are not aware of what  Facebook Shopping is, it may be worth a quick recap. Earlier this year Facebook began rolling out its ecommerce functionality onto Facebook pages, allowing fans of a given group/page to purchase products without having to leave Facebook. Some good examples include:

Livescribe (the only niggle here is that this one actually takes you to an external site)

ASOS (obviously the fashion giant has enabled the feature to buy straight from Facebook on the proviso that you become a fan first!)

The combination of these two techniques may make a very appealing business case towards multi-territorial expansion, especially when all you need to do once you have the product feeds is to structure the copy and tone to appeal to the local market. If that market doesn’t work you can take the learnings and try again. You can probably recycle the same templates and product feed; all you need to do is produce the localised version.

It may well be that we can say good bye to overly complicated multi-territorial projects and instead embrace the 2.0 technology to deliver the same result at half the cost.

Are you engaging on Facebook on other territories? Or are you using Facebook shopping? If so,  tell us what you like or dislike.

Facebook is again at the forefront of savvy advertisers minds.  A new feature is being tested and speculated to be fully rolled out this year that is said to dramatically change how ads are being served to fellow Facebookers. The current model of advertising serves ads based on preferences set by the advertiser which match those of the target user’s profile preferences. For many, this was already in itself smarter than the Google AdWords targeting which was designed to be keyword focused. The only similarity between the two is the bidding system; Facebook’s ad bidding system is similar to Google’s in theory but not quite in practice. A key difference is that after clicking on a Facebook ad you can attribute an “I like” which gives a vote of confidence to the page where you ended up and effectively goes beyond bounce rate. On Google, things are changing and Google +1 is meant to deliver exactly the same functionality from the SERPs. More on that will come in a separate post from us.

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To the amusement of many in online marketing this week, Sarah Palin has been caught out commenting and supporting her own posts and content on Facebook with a second, fake account. Needless to say, this is somewhat discrediting. Therefore, I write this post, partly for her so that she may learn and move on to greatness she is destined for. Ahem.

I attended the annual Search Engine Strategies meeting this week and was lucky enough to catch Liana “Li” Evans’ (@storyspinner)session Killer Facebook Marketing Tactics. She talked about how Facebook is not a search engine and rather a connectivity platform. She showed us an example of a search she did for a hotel called “The Mint”. For obvious reasons Facebook does not show the correct, or in this case; desired result.

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