Daniel Patricio
Rethinking how we communicate, collaborate and innovate
The Facebook Identity Goldrush
9 Jun 2009
Today Facebook announced several new developments to aid both brands and people increase the punch of Facebook as a marketing tool. Aligned with their recent moves to make Pages more business friendly, the development of public personal profiles and the elimination of regional networks Facebook is taking strides to increase the scope of who we interact with on Facebook outside of our circle of family and friends.
This means that brands can add more branding to their existing pages eg. http://facebook.com/coke instead of http://www.facebook.com/pages/sumol/17755744821?sid=b1873b411cfc9230ab5dd301af42fc59&ref=search
This important because from the perspective of search engine optimization as Facebook Pages or Profiles will show up more prominently in Google search results and will result in more ‘organic’ visitors to your Facebook Presence.
As marketers this is important because it increases the reach of Facebook marketing campaigns and it also increases the accessibility of promoting campaigns. Instead of having people remember a 50 character link, you can direct people to a far more memorable url such as http://facebook.com/danielpatricio or http://facebook.com/coke.
I have already created easier to remember urls for several of the clients I work with eg. http://bizlaunch.ca/facebook but this is a great step and should make it more easy for those who are less intuitive to share their profiles with more people.
Personally a big focus of my work with clients revolves around leveraging the offline interactions back online to a social media presence such as Facebook, so this is going to be a great way of redirecting those offline experiences back online with an easy to remember message.
Oh yeah and if your name is John Smith and you would like to own http://facebook.com/johnsmith, you will probably have to stay up until 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, June 13 to even stand a chance.
I think this is a great step and really adds value to any corporate or personal Facebook marketing campaign.
Will you be adding your new custom Facebook Profile url on your business cards?
- Tags: Corporate Branding, facebook, Identity
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About
The world around us is changing and we all are looking for the leaders to show us where this road will take us.
Ambitious and passionate in equal measure, Daniel Patricio is a digital marketing and community strategist who develops social media campaigns and consults to brands on marketing in the digital age.
He is the founder and CEO of Orange Rhino Media and founded GenY Toronto a meetup for young people in the startup, marketing and tech industries.
He has worked, consulted and advised to national and international brands in the pharmaceutical, banking, cosmetics, liquor, university and small business sectors.
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