NewsFeed Marketing and Optimization
October 17th, 2007
Five years ago, the key to establishing a competitive advantage online was mastering the secret arts of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) on Google. Having expertise in both meant that you were able to help your online business rise above the noise of millions of results and appear above the fold. Companies that built these muscles were able to leverage their high organic page rank and/or reduced cost per click prices as core drivers of enterprise value. For examples of this phenomenon, look no further than the number of comparison shopping engines that have exited for in excess of $500m in recent years: Shopping.com, Pricegrabber, Nextag, and Shopzilla.
Flash forward five years and there is a new opportunity, this time enabled by Facebook instead of Google. Instead of SE it’s all about the NF (NewsFeed). The key driver of distribution and promotion across Facebook is leveraging the social graph, which expresses itself most explicitly in the NewsFeed. Companies that learn now how to optimize their applications for inclusion in the NewsFeed will benefit mightily in the years to come. NFM (NewsFeed Marketing) experts will be those that best understand how to get the most bang from their buck in terms of purchasing Facebook inventory such as sponsored stories. NFO (NewFeed Optimization) experts will build and promote their own apps with an eye on having the social graph do the hard work of organic NewsFeed listing.
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