Commentary

Vitrue to Bring Facebook Marketing Apps to Phones

Coffee-AppsWe have been saying all year in these pages and at our OMMA events that 2011 has not been the “year of mobile” so much as the “year of playing mobile catch-up.” User adoption of smartphones and the sheer velocity of post-PC use have been flying off the charts. Retailers scrambled to get a viable strategy for capturing mobilized shoppers this holiday. Almost everyone is racing onto the mobile Web and exploring their brand’s mobile search and discovery strategies.

But what about Facebook? The massively popular social network has been challenged enough to create a strong online marketing business, but the role of advertising and marketing on its crazy-popular mobile platform is pretty much invisible. Without ads, billions of impressions delivered to smartphones by Facebook simply go to waste, from a marketer’s perspective. Until now, a mobile Facebook strategy for brands amounted to ensuring your items showed up on users' feeds. 

In a sign late last week that third parties are starting to think harder about the mobile marketing opportunity, even if Facebook itself is lagging, Vitrue introduced a social network tool that targets the mobile experience. The technology allows an advertiser to better leverage its brand mention in someone’s feed by creating a mobile-optimized app for a Facebook tab. Vitrue has been a development consultant for Facebook in the past, and at AppNation last week the company revealed this new tool that gives smartphone users a more seamless engagement with marketing messages.

Tabs and apps have not been optimized for mobile on Facebook. But now, when the user clicks on a brand item in the feed, it can trigger a tab with content specifically designed for viewing and use on a smartphone. In the example in the online demo, a marketer offers a coupon that pops up in its own tab, formatted for mobile use and able to be printed from the phone.

The model should allow marketers an easier way to get the 40% or so of Facebook users who access the network over smartphones to do simple things like fill out forms and even play games. The technology is in beta now and expected to roll out early in the year.

Of course, as Josh Constine points out in his coverage of the model at TechCrunch, this implementation of mobile-aware HTML5 code should have been a no-brainer for Facebook itself long ago. At some point this capability should be built into Facebook’s platform itself. And no doubt other social media marketing solutions providers will develop similar offerings, until Facebook itself just makes the model standard.

Those inscrutable folks at Facebook make it hard to tell whether their mobile implementation constitutes a strategy or an accident. The fact that Facebook keeps marketer messages in the app newsfeed -- and display advertising off the mobile platform --  is one of the reasons Facebook is better on mobile for me than it is on the Web.  

1 comment about "Vitrue to Bring Facebook Marketing Apps to Phones ".
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  1. Krithika Rosenthal from Colangelo Synergy Marketing, December 5, 2011 at 4:39 p.m.

    Finally, so does this also mean now we can link to the tab directly from say a QR code? That has been one of the issues so far for marketers, directing to a custom Tab on Facebook from a mobile barcode.

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