zaterdag 2 februari 2013

Hey Mr. Zuckerberg, how’s this for a business model?

Everyone sees the potential of Facebook. However, their business model just isn’t right yet. Here are a few things what Facebook could really send of flying.


Buying is a subset of searching
Facebook has potentially more information of it’s users than Google has. But Google’s making billions. The reason is simple. You use Google to search for things you want to buy, you don’t use Facebook (or Twitter for that matter) to look for things to buy. Hence, when using Facebook, you are not looking for things to buy.

Why not make a Facebook Shopping? Read on, this will make sense.

For starters, everyone has something to sell. So every Facebooker is a potential shop. Yes, we have eBay and Craigslist, but since we are good with Facebook, adding something is easy in our shop page. For each item we can choose if it’s for friends, friend of friends or public. But since we have profiles, we have location information as well.

But now it’s getting interesting because money is involved. Paying and receiving money is easy. And having money leads to more buying, preferably with the money you already have on your Facebook account. But the real power comes from searching. Now Facebook will be used to buy things and thus advertising will be more beneficial, more relevant and more successful. Because commercial companies can also use a Facebook Shop as extension of their page, people and businesses both live in the same eco system. Facebook can facilitate Shop Articles, money transfers, insurance, in short, the works. And each thing mentioned is profitable.

How to upload photos is already known, so making photo’s for the shop and uploading them is easy. It also enhances the knowledge you already have from users, but now each user is a potential advertiser!

Goal is that people use Facebook to search for things. Buying is a subset of searching.

Of course an API to manage stores (which will create another eco-system on Facebook Shop software). Analytics are Paramount and worth a premium, see next section. If the analytics are any good people will learn how to tweak their shop to sell more against better prices. You want your store to be ad free? There’s a premium for that!


Premium users
All accounts are pretty equal right now. They are all for free. Why? There’s tons of potential for paying. No only to get rid of advertisements -what no one wants because of our previous mention of shopping- but also to upload better resolutions of photo’s, more photo’s, automated backup, more control what to see and not see, more control of how your page looks

Of course, these are some high level ideas, I have more, but like to share them in a live session.

Henri Koppen