• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 2, 2010

Fan Appz will release Tuesday a social media marketing platform to aid small- to-medium-size businesses (SMBs) engage fans on Facebook.

The platform, Professional, lets Facebook page administrators create and distribute brand-specific polls, quizzes and promotions that fans can share with friends to extend brand awareness and drive traffic.

The platform provides built-in viral marketing tools that consider a business model relied on by Siebel Systems in the late 1990s. Each time a fan takes a quiz or participates in a poll, responses can publish to their Facebook stream. The tool set, offered as a subscription, costs about $50 monthly and includes video features.

Jon Siegal, founder and chief executive officer at Fan Appz, built the application based from concepts that helped Siebel Systems grow into a billion-dollar company as vice president of sales. He began working at Siebel in 1997 and "took the lessons learned from Siebel Systems to help attract and retain fans in social media."

Siegal says the same type of marketers who know email marketing and paid-click advertising must now learn new skills as the lines to define online ads and engagement continue to blur.

The key difference between marketing during the early 2000s and now means "you can't just club someone over the head with an ad or direct offer," he says. "You have to pull people in with engagement around the brand."

Facebook feeds and Fanpages now indexed on search engines, such as Google and Bing, also assist companies to climb in rankings through search engine optimization. It can potentially drive site visitors from the search engine back to the company's Web site, according to Siegal. Companies can aggregate audiences based on interests in a specific brand or business.

The Fan App Professional platform released Tuesday does not include ads. It does let companies select top 5 favorites from branded content or Fan Appz content, create pools that include text, images and video. It also allows companies to post quizzes that challenge fans' knowledge, and offer promotions and coupons.

Until now, the Fan Appz service has been available for free or as a custom platform. The features were limited to Top5 Lists, Polls and Quizzes with ads supporting the applications. The custom portion of the platform included branding and the ability to monetize Facebook Fan pages through sweepstakes, virtual gifts, Fan store merchandise, and tickets.

Aside from NBC and Hulu, the National Basketball Association (NBA), Relativity Media, and Molotov have used Fan Appz's platform, according to the company.