Social Media B2B

Yesterday when logging in to Facebook, users were greeted with a box stating that their privacy settings were going to be updated.

The first paragraph is directed towards users and implies that Facebook is making things easier to manage with both a reduced set of controls and the ability to control individual posts and updates. But it is really the second paragraph that revels their true motives and is the part that helps B2B companies.

At the same time, we are helping everyone find and connect with each other by keeping some information – like your name and profile picture – publicly available.

As a user continues to click through the screens, Facebook provides its recommendations for how these settings should be configured. These recommendations encourage you to make family and relationships, work and education and all status updates and posts public and available to everyone. Does this make it easier for your friends and family to find you on Facebook? Sure it does. But it makes it much easier for B2B companies to find their customers, prospects, vendors and partners.

Facebook is trying to manage both sides of their equation and serve their users who create profiles and provide Facebook with its huge valuation by constantly updating their status and checking their wall several times a day. The value of this data is what Facebook is counting on for their next phase of monetization and growth. The way that your B2B company can leverage that data is part of that plan. The success of B2B companies using social media is to connect people to each other to strengthen existing relationships and to forge new ones.

How does a company go about finding their existing connections on Facebook?
Currently searching for users on Facebook is very limited because many people’s privacy settings prevent information being shown to those that are not their friends. Facebook is encouraging users to allow access to more information, but isn’t really touting the benefits of this openness. The benefits are to B2B companies who can now more easily prospect on Facebook. Just because this data now may be available doesn’t mean that people want to be pitched on Facebook. You still need to find common ground and engage with prospects in the hopes that they will respond.

As more and more Facebook users make their status updates public, this information will be searchable both within Facebook and outside of it. In their continuing quest to improve search by incorporating more real time updates, Google announced earlier this week that they plan to index Facebook’s status updates in the same way they are leveraging Twitter’s real time updates.

Facebook Changed Your CRM System
With its move to open more data to the public, Facebook set the tone for the next generation of business data collection and analysis. We have talked before on Social Media B2B about the future of CRM systems and how they will get more social. Facebook helped this prediction become a reality. Along with YouTube and Flickr, Facebook is one of the largest resources for user generated content and, more importantly, the content is directly tied to people, not fake user names or closed accounts. Soon you will be integrating Facebook data into personal profiles in your CRM system and creating systems to analyze broad industry issues to help make important business decisions.

Make sure your employees understand the implications of these privacy changes. Plan for ways this newly opened firehouse of information could help solidify business relationships and influence organizational decision making.

Do you think Facebook has other motives behind these changes?

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