Seat at the Table

Public relations professionals interested in direct to consumer communications and online community should pray for the adwords-scale success of Facebook Flyers.

I’ve been testing out flyers and here’s what I found:

1. They have the potential of targeting very specific interest groups.  Right now, you can either target everyone or university campuses.  If they take the university targeting capability and expand it to any Facegroup group, it would allow professionals to identify groups of individuals with appropriate interest, and post flyers (communicate messages) to those groups.
2. General flyers or flyers targeted to other groups can be used to build membership in new groups.  Direct to audience communications programs, such as ambassador programs, can form groups in Facebook then use Flyers to recruit (right now you can just invite people in).  Here is a group for mobile gadget users that I’m testing now: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5852073717
3. If Facebook’s approach takes off, then maybe other social networks will implement similar tools, making it easier for communications professionals to identify specific audiences and deliver messages only to those audiences.

Take a test drive at http://www.facebook.com/flyers.php.  This is the basic version.  There is also a new pay-per-click version.

And please feel free to contact me with any questions at cohen AT fortexgroup.com