How to make Facebook profitable

01/24/09 10:02 AM

What do you do to make money if you have a Website with over 200 million unique users? Why not charge companies for Facebook pages and provide them with unique tools to monitor and drive traffic to their site? You can't charge people for using Facebook because they'll leave you in droves, especially in a down economy. You have built a unique Website that attracts a lot of people and have a lot of cool features & after all Facebook IS a business struggling to become profitable. This means tough decisions are going to have to be made but charging marketers to market on your site is the right thing to do.

Marketers are always trying to get their message in front of as many people as possible. Facebook has a great sized audience that can interact with brands but this should not be free for business as their goal is also to make money. Facebook would need to provide business, however, with some great and easy tools to monitor their pages including the following:

-Quantitative metrics (visitors, unique visitors, time on site etc..)

-Funnel analysis tools

-Unique apps that could be used by business to enhance their page (most business are clueless here so this would be an added value)

Why not even offer to build pages for small businesses that are not Internet or social media savvy? Sure it would have to be a turn key operation that automatically generates reports and suggests content and apps for the site but there could be gold mine here. A Facebook platform that could be deployed within companies as a KM tool would also be a great idea. As more people learn how to use Facebook the learning time would be minimal and communications within companies are always screwed up. I love the idea of a Facebook app for company intranets.

Now for those of you who say "Facebook would lose its appeal" I am going to push back and say nonsense. If Facebook can control how businesses use and develop content and webpages and make sure that they are a value to consumers it could be a win win situation for everyone. It sure as hell would be more valuable that a banner ad on Yahoo! or MSN. Agencies are charging big bucks to set up and monitor Facebook pages, I know as I was just quoted a huge price for an agency to develop and monitor a Facebook page for a client. When I presented it to the client he asked me "is that a lot of money?". Needless to say we told the agency to take a hike.

Facebook is a great social media site and a lot of money has been spent to build this best in class social media platform. However, it's time to take it to next level and charge businesses for using this great platform. After all it's about making money for Facebook so that they can stay around for awhile.