Business sense
Facebook has renewed its focus on the business side of its social-network offering, with the launch of Facebook for Business. The initiative is designed to encourage businesses to take advantage of Facebook's massive network of potential customers, whether via advertising, the establishment of Pages for products and services, or even tighter integration into Facebook's platform.
Taking a step up from regular advertising are Sponsored Stories, which pushes user activity on business pages into the news feeds of Facebook users' contacts. The claim is that as the promotion of the brand, or product (or whatever else one might wish to advertise) is coming from 'friends' rather than as a direct, and more easily ignored, advert, it is likely to be more influential. Facebook also wishes to encourage businesses to make use of the Facebook platform by building applications that enable customers to use Facebook to get deals, recommendations and customised apps.
Although Facebook is keen to point out the benefits to partnering businesses, there are clear benefits to Facebook, too. As well as advertising revenue - a very direct and tangible gain for Facebook - there's the importance of lock in. Facebook's growth has been perpetuated by network effects (it only makes sense to join the social network everyone else has), and its staying power will be decided by how much hassle leaving will be to its users, and what they'll sacrifice by abandoning Facebook.
