Social Networking - Monetizing Facebook Business Apps

In previous articles we’ve looked at “apps” (applications) for Facebook:
1. Standard packaged apps
2. Customised apps used by the UK political parties to spread the word approaching the general election

Let’s look at a couple of custom-written apps for commercial businesses, the first of which is the simplest form – customised Facebook pages

Marmite. Do you love it or hate it? They have taken this question and produced a series of Facebook marketing campaigns. The one earlier in 2010 was a mock election between two “parties”l:

• The “Love Party"
• “Marmite - Hate it” which promises to ‘Stop the Spread’ of Marmite

There are also various other Facebook sites for Marmite (type Marmite into Facebook’s search)

During the "election" they had apps to help “spread the word”, just like the main UK political parties did. But these have been removed now the Marmite election is over.

Another household food brand has taken apps a stage further. Pringles has 3.4million “fans”, and has set up two apps:

1. “Pringoooals”, playing on the World Cup theme
2. “Oversharers” where a user can use a Pringles-sponsored button to tell friends when they blab too much in their status updates.

Both the Marmite and Pringles examples are in the B2C space, principally because Facebook provides the vast numbers of people that are a B2C marketer’s dream.

Monetizing Facebook apps more directly has been described as “the holy grail”. We’ll look at this in the next apps article.

If you know of any other good apps examples, B2B or B2C, do add a comment.

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