We've been taking a look at Facebook Pages to see whether these would be a good way to promote www.beauty2u.com. This has also required us to understand facebook applications and how they can be used in conjunction with pages.

Before getting into the meat of it, I'll explain about our understanding of the facebook phenomenon which is quite important to understanding how and why we've done what we've done.

Being quite new to facebook, its taken a while to get our heads around the whole dynamics of it and what makes it so successful and appealling to people. Doing that requires that you immerse yourself in it for a few weeks and hook up with some friends and watch how all the different entities and concepts within facebook interact to create the social networking goodness that is facebook. I'd also recommend getting some of your younger staff to show you how and why they use facebook - because they're almost certainly doing it already and have a pile of friends. Having done that, we set about understanding how we could lever facebook to derive commercial gains for beauty2u. Its quite clear now that facebook is in a deep soul searching time right-now, trying to figure out how it makes money from its massive customer base whilst at the same time not alienating its loyal fan base - who have grown to trust facebook partly due to its clean advert-free functionality. A tough challenge but one we'd all like to have !   In my opinion they're doing well with the challenge but the comprises that this internal conflict creates are evident in the design of Facebook Pages and Facebook Applications.... read on.

Facebook actively encourage commercial entities to establish a presence on facebook using facebook pages. See www.facebook.com/business/?pages. In order to create an effective page you'll need to master Facebook's subset/superset of HTML called FBML (facebook mark-up language). This language is very clever and allows you to write content in an HTML-like way, mostly using standard HTML tags, but enriched with additional features offered by faceboook tags. To learn about FBML go to wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/FBML.

Facebook have implemented functionality that allows you to build a new promotional page, the fits well within the facebook framework. However, in our opinion, it lacks an effective way to build and retain a customer base in facebook. The concepts exist in terms of the "fans" association which allows facebook users to associate with a facebook page by becoming a fan. The problem is that unless you're the latest media frenzy, you aren't going to get many users volunteer to become a fan. Normal simple businesses like beauty2u need to incentivise people to become fans - this is normal business practise and the simplest most recognised way to do this is to offer a special offer to facebook users exclusively in return for them becoming a fan. Except you can't do this using facebook's built-in capabilities - after several forum discussions it clear that this is a result of the conflicting goals mentioned earlier. They could have introduced a simple FBML tag - something like ONLY-SHOW-THIS-BIT-TO-USERS-IF-THEY'RE-FANS but they didn't. Oh well actually, according to some people on the forums, they originially did include something like this but later decided that they don't want people to "force fans" to join because its not in the spirit of facebook - we're back to the conflict again.

Our solution was to create a facebook application which is included on our facebook page www.facebook.com/pages/beauty2ucom/27431216507. The application is coded in PHP and is hosted outside facebook (as all applications are) and is reasonably complex. It allows us to detect whether the user viewing the page is a Fan of the page and if so, to show them the promotional codes. Sounds great doesn't it. So realising that others might like to use this functionality we've wrapped the application up in a generic way so that other pages can include it and achieve the same thing. Please feel free to add the application to your own facebook page from where, as a page admin, you will be able to configure the promotional codes that your fans see. You can read about the application at http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=23590331285

We will add more about this application to this page when the application is finished.