Seasonal businesses, Facebook & FBML

In spring of this year, Facebook started allowing Facebook pages to be customized more heavily with Facebook Markup language (FBML). This customization allows for greater control of messaging on a company or organization’s Facebook Page.

Toys R Us has provided an example of a particularly shrewd deployment of this functionality with a Black Friday-specific Facebook Page offering. The page gives a preview of the Black Friday promotions Toys R Us will be running, but only to fans of the page. Users can then click through to Toys R Us’ main site.

Toys R Us has gone from 125,000 to 410,000 fans in 6 days. Think about how lucrative it will be for Toys R Us to have created that many qualified leads that they can now contact via email or Facebook message promotions.  A few years ago, that number of leads would probably have to be accomplished via a huge mail campaign.  The cost for the Facebook solution for Toys R Us (and what it would be for you) is almost certainly much, much lower.

You might be thinking that this was a perfect storm for Toys R Us, and that this can’t be applied to your business.  However, consider the following:

• Does your business have predictable ebbs and flows that you could exploit based on particular periods of high-demand?
• How many conversions would you have to create to recoup the initial development to develop a page (and likely have to spend on the advertising side to drive initial traffic)?
• Are these the people you need to reach to create conversions using Facebook?

It’s worth thinking about, especially because the cost is right (likely a few thousand dollars).  Depending on your situation, a FBML page could provide a high-yield marketing opportunity for your company or organization.