FreshNetworks Blog

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There has long been a debate in social media marketing between engaging people where they are at the moment (on Facebook or Twitter for example), and bringing them together to engage on your own site (such as your own forums or online community). This is, to some extent, an unhelpful argument. There has been no clear-cut answer, and the truth is that it all depends what you are using social media for, who your audience is, and how you want to engage them. The best approach has often been to combine both – in a hub-and-spoke model where you engage both in social networks and on your own site.

Through 2011 we expect this issue to become at the same time more complicated and more simple with the continued rise of the social graph.

To date, Facebook’s social graph has been underused by brands. It’s not surprising. The concept is quite complicated, and it also challenges what we think we know about social media marketing. Including the debate about going where people are or bringing them to your site. Social graph lets you do both. At the same time.

The social graph, at its simplest, allows you to use your friends, likes and other interactions in Facebook when you are browsing other sites. To put this in practical terms – on the Amazon.com site, you can use social graph to generate recommendations of things your friends might want you to buy them. It will recommend authors a friend says they like on Facebook, or if they say they like Football it will recommend products that might appeal to them. And what’s more it will recommend things for certain friends around their birthday so you get useful advice on what to buy people when it is relevant for them.Social graph brings insight and social to the shopping experience on Amazon.com – adding value and doing something that just hasn’t been possible before.

Through 2011 we expect to see more experimentation with social graph. More brands using the data and information on Facebook to add value to a consumer’s experience on their own site. This is part of a broader trend towards distributing social across a company’s consumer journey and contact points, and even across their business. But that’s the topic for another post in this informal series on social media in 2011.

This post is part of an informal series: Social Media in 2011.