Forrester's Marketing Blog
Facebook Needs To Take Marketing Seriously
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ForresterMarketing/~3/V7gki6sB_UM/12-05-14-facebook_needs_to_take_marketing_seriously

My colleague Melissa Parrish and I have been thinking about the Facebook IPO. Our thoughts:

The world's biggest social network will complete its initial public offering in a few days, with a valuation based largely on its strong history of innovation. But we have to wonder: Will Facebook ever focus any of that innovation on helping marketers?

After all, Facebook is fantastic at introducing great new features and services for its end users. The moment another social tool gains the interest of enough users - whether it's Twitter's rapid public chatter or Foursquare's location-based check-ins - Facebook updates its own site to offer similar features to its legions of users. We've rarely seen a company borrow from its competition as quickly or as well as Facebook. And that focus on better serving end users has seen Facebook grow quickly over the years, even in the face of consistent privacy concerns.

But as good as Facebook has been at evolving to serve consumers, that's how bad it's been at serving marketers. In the past five years Facebook has lurched from one advertising model to another. Remember when the site charged marketers to host branded pages? Or when every page featured banners from MSN's ad network? (You may choose to forget Facebook Beacon; Mark Zuckerberg would certainly prefer you did.)

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