Tips from Blue SkyFactory on Facebook Messages
One online marketer and blogger I pay special attention to is Christopher S. Penn (@cspenn on Twitter). He’s founded one of my favorite national events, PodCamp with Chris Brogan and is always passing online the best, most informative articles on Twitter.
Today he passed on an article from his employer BlueSkyFactory, called “Facebook Messages: A Marketer’s To-Do List“.
The article notes that “The general consensus within the email industry is that Facebook Messages will not kill email (how many times must poor email’s life be threatened?!?), but it will present some new challenges for email marketers.”
What Facebook Messages allows you to do, is send email to people’s @Facebook email account. Every Facebook user has one and they will be fairly easy to figure out just by looking at people’s usernames.
Some other take-aways from the article:
- “The format of Facebook Messages will be plain text by default, meaning that your beautiful HTML email won’t be seen by @facebook.com subscribers unless they click on an easily missed link to view the HTML version.”
- Companies with Facebook pages may be given preferential treatment when it comes to message delivery. “So create a Facebook page for your company, and update that page as often as possible with valuable content for your fans. To encourage your email subscribers to “like” your Facebook page, create an email campaign devoted to this purpose, and consider offering subscribers an incentive to “like” your company on Facebook.”
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- “As part of Facebook Messages, each Facebook user will have two folders: Messages and Other. Initially, messages from friends only will go to the Messages folder, and all others will go to the Other folder. Facebook users, however, will have the opportunity to move wanted messages to the Messages folder, thus giving them preferential treatment for future messages.” This means that you need to start out with relevant, useful messages so that you’re allowed into the main inbox in the future.
- “Facebook has announced that subject lines in their traditional sense will not be used in Facebook Messages, but subject lines of emails from external sources will be shown as the first line within the email content, and this first line will be bolded.”
Read the full article to learn more about Facebook Messaging.
