The future of Facebook marketing

I have been a Facebook developer for a long time. One of my most popular software products in fact is the Tab Engine suite of Facebook fan page apps. Well now Im going to tell you something that no other Facebook developer or marketer is going to admit. Its tough for me to say it, but its the truth. The Fanpage is DEAD. Yep that’s right Facebook killed them. Here are some stats for you to consider:

1) Over 97% of your Facebook fans has never, and will never actually visit your fan page (they like, and engage from their timeline, not from your fan page itself). You see now its all about the timeline. No one actually visits your fan page unless you run an ad that directs them to it. Even then once they do that first visit the vast majority will never come back. This is a harsh stat but its the truth.

2) Building huge amounts of fans is good for very little more than stroking your ego. Why? Because Facebook has killed the edge rank of a fan page. Only about 15% at most (and often less) of your fans will ever see your fan page posts unless you pay Facebook for each post. Really do you want to pay a bunch of money on ads to get fans, spend a bunch of time posting content, only to have to pay Facebook again every time you want more than a few percent of your fans to see your posts? I sure dont. In fact you can look at the Tab Engine fan page, with over 15,000 likes, and I dont even post to it anymore. Its not an effective use of my time.

3) Facebook fan pages have very poor mobile support. More than half of all the users on Facebook use Facebook on mobile devices. But fan pages dont support mobile devices very well. Worse yet Facebook has indicated that they have little interest in making fan pages mobile compliant.

So does this mean that people should just forget about fan pages? Not at all. Fortunately there is a way to breath new life into fan pages and recapture their former glory. The secret is in the timeline. Think about this. What if you could run viral contests and sweepstakes inside of your timeline and then use these timeline contests to collect peoples emails which are then automatically added to your autoresponder?

It solves all of our problems.

1) The timeline is where your fans are interacting so putting the contest in the timeline is just common sense. Instead of trying to divert traffic from the timeline to your contest or sweepstake app on your fan page you are putting it smack in the middle of all that traffic, where it is.

2) By collecting the emails of your fans and those who enter the contests you can then message them at will without needing to pay Facebook to boost the post each time.

3) The timeline is 100% mobile ready. It works on all mobile devices and it works on the Facebook app. By making compliant apps that work in the timeline you are solving all mobile device issues and your not just wasting 50% of more of the Facebook traffic.

Being that I have made a good living selling Facebook fan page apps, the fact that the fan page and specifically fan page apps are quickly outliving their usefulness has been a very tough pill for me to swallow.

For months I didn’t want to admit it, even to myself. But the facts are irrefutable. The future of Facebook marketing is the timeline, and using the timeline to build email lists through contests and sweepstakes. Period. The upside is that since most people still have not accepted this simple fact we can all get a huge jump on capitalizing on this evolution.

The problem is that I’m just one person, a single developer. Tab Engine took me 6 months to write. If I where to start on a new system to capitalize on the time line right now it would not even be ready for testing for months. By that time we would have missed  the opportunity to get in on this first.

Fortunately I know another developer who has resources I simply do not have. He has an entire team of developers and designers and he had the foresight to start developing Facebook timeline apps early. After months of development and spending a six figure budget the new timeline app system “ZoSocial” is about to be released. I have been testing it and all I can say is this is awesome. I’m honest enough to admit that this is at least as good, and likely better, than anything I could have done myself. In fact because it was developed by a team of programmers with a huge budget its probably better than anything any single developer could do on their own.

Because of this I have decided that instead of being late in the game by starting development of my own system that’s likely to end up less powerful (simply because I’m not a team with a six figure development budget), I’m instead going to support the ZoSocial software. The way I’m going to do this is not only by promoting the software but by also offering my extensive Facebook experience to ZoSocial users. I’m going to do this by giving personal training to the people who get their copy through me.

I’m doing this because I 100% believe that this is the future of Facebook marketing and that this is a HUGE opportunity for everyone who takes advantage of it.

Check your email tomorrow or stop back here for my complete review of the ZoSocial platform and also to find out how you can get personal expert training. Honestly this is so huge and revolutionary that I’m not even going to try to compete with it, instead I’m going to put my support and weight behind it.A quick note about the reviews I do on this site. The product vendors give me access to their products for free in order for me to do my review. However I make no promises to them regarding the results of my tests or what I will write in my review. Should you click a link that takes you to a sales page for a paid product for sale this link will be an affiliate link and I will be paid a percentage of the sales price should you decide to invest in it.