Businesses must embrace Facebook as it offers an unprecedented marketing opportunity. Facebookdata can be used to expand a customer base, foster loyalty and improve the customer experience. But just what is the best way to go about this and make sense of the enormous volumes of data generated?

Got a Facebook page? That’s just the start
The first task for any company to undertake is to establish a Facebook Page. Once Facebook users ‘like’ a Page, they immediately begin receiving that company’s postings on their personal newsfeeds. This provides a unique and free channel for the company to reach consumer audiences with its messages, yet even this isn’t enough to tempt some businesses.

Earlier this year MicroStrategy conducted research, looking at the Sprint 100 list of emerging Scottish businesses to see how many had Facebook pages - and was surprised that just 16% did. The Sprint 100 is compiled by Business Insider. It lists independent and profitable Scottish companies with more than £250,000 turnover three years ago but no more than £8m in the most recent year. So while they might still be new as businesses, they are sufficiently established to use Facebook as a sales and marketing channel.

But a Facebook page is really only a start. Messages delivered from a Facebook Page are static, offering limited opportunity for interaction. They are also broadcast to a mass audience, preventing personalisation of messages to the individual’s tastes or behaviour.

In addition, while Facebook Pages provide companies with high-level statistics on the fans who ‘like’ their Page, this does not give sufficient insight into the fan base to allow a company to take action and maximise marketing opportunities.

The same is true of advertising on Facebook. Many companies advertise there and while Facebook advertising can bring a very broad population of users messages and offers, these advertisements are not personalised, do they contain interactive compelling content, such as, multimedia, deals, coupons and loyalty perks.

This limits the potential reach and success of a company’s marketing efforts, particularly amongst a loyal fan base. Fans do not necessarily want to see ads; they want value and personalised content, which can include offers and promotions.

Taking the next step
Speaking at the Social Media Marketing and iCommerce summit this summer, Facebook’s TimCampos, (right) urged businesses to make closer ties between IT and marketing departments to forge social CRM strategies, saying that users are fully confident when using the social network and see it as a trusted eco-system.

The most effective way to use this eco-system and achieve personalised, highly-targeted messaging and interactivity with Facebook users, is through a Facebook app. A compelling Facebook app brings targeted, personalised messaging, offers, services, merchandise, and relevant content directly to consumers, bringing them closer to a brand and boosting loyalty.

Facebook’s social graph, which represents the millions of connections made by users every day, can be leveraged within an app to ensure a company broadcasts messages to fans in a way that drives interest and promote daily interactions between a fan and the brand, putting the company ‘front of mind’ for the consumer. Ideally, such a Facebook app would be available on mobile devices as well as the Web, to take best advantage of immediacy and the pervasive use of mobile devices.

Facebook provides a set of open application programming interfaces (APIs) – the core called Graph API  – that allows third parties to develop Facebook applications. These APIs provide rich functionality for reading data from Facebook’s social graph and for writing ‘interactivity’ back to the social graph, such as Facebook Likes, Comments, and Shares. Thousands of companies have built more than 100,000 Facebook applications using these APIs. However, the vast majority of these applications are games, utilities, personal tools, and novelty applications.

Few businesses have created truly valuable business-to-consumer applications because the Facebook APIs and underlying data structures don’t lend themselves to one-to-one marketing, campaign management and execution, cross-sell recommendation engines or customer care.

Creating an app that can truly harness Facebook’s social graph data requires additional technology and data structures that fall outside of Facebook’s social graph database and the Graph API. These additional data structures are needed to handle targeting, personalisation, analytics, and history.

Connecting Facebook to your business
Every Facebook application requires explicit permissions from each user to access his or her Facebook data. After a user grants his or her permission to gather this data via your Facebook app, Facebook grants a ‘token’ to the app, enabling it to collect Facebook data via their Graph API.

Rather than a company trying to learn Facebook’s APIs and formatting that data into something usable, you can use third party technology that uses the permissions given to your company to extract data from the social graph database. It places that data into a relational data model and provides this structured data to your company. The data is refreshed on a scheduled, ongoing basis so you always have the most up to date consumer information.

A significant benefit of having a relational model at the heart of your Facebook app is that Facebook apps can make much richer and simpler queries against a relational database. And, because developers are far more accustomed to operating with a relational DBMS, they can develop Facebook applications faster and with more predictable performance. This enables your Facebook applications to be managed in a sound way, using your existing and well established IT tools and procedures.

By providing a bridge between Facebook data and your enterprise IT environment, MicroStrategy Gateway  opens the door to a wide range of application development. For example, your company has the opportunity to integrate your enterprise data into your Facebook applications, because both Facebook data and enterprise data are managed in the same relational data technology. This integration presents significant value to your organisation.

Getting personal
Using enriched relational data on which to build Facebook apps means businesses can quickly reap the benefits of those apps. With a tight integration between the enterprise environment and Facebook apps, a company can deliver highly personalised and relevant content to consumers, conduct sophisticated analytics, and integrate enterprise and Facebook data to provide 360-degree service to consumers.

This is why business in Scotland that are without a Facebook page, need to address this as a matter of urgency - and they should all really be developing Facebook apps as well. A compelling Facebook app can not only enable an organisation to leverage the rich and continuously refreshed data contained in Facebook, but bring targeted, personalised messaging, offers, services, and relevant content directly to customers, bringing them closer to a brand and boosting loyalty.




There are some amazing businesses in Scotland, recognised in the Sprint 100 and beyond, but by not using Facebook they are seriously missing out. Scottish businesses can gain significant business benefits by tapping into the power of Facebook data.