360DigitalInfluence

As a follow up to our recent webinar, Facebook Bootcamp for PR, you’ll see five blog posts in the coming weeks exploring the five trends set out in our presentation.

There are two distinct forms of currency set to expand on Facebook: Facebook credits and cold, hard cash. Months after Facebook playing around with gift credits and launching a candy coated beta test, Facebook announced last week that it will be rolling out more gift monetization options. And just on Wednesday, Facebook posted a Payment Terms of Service Agreement on their developers’ site showing that this option is not far off. In this post I’ll touch on both and what each trend means for brands.

Facebook credits: The basic idea here is that brands will be able to provide their fans Facebook gifts with a credit attached (see Mars beta test above). Right now, fans can save up these credits and use them to purchase more gifts to send to friends. Most also speculate that the recent addition of being able to “like” a friend’s status, link, or photo is a precursor to those thumbs-up being virtual credits.

You can imagine in the future brands will be able to use these credits to interact with and draw fans. Perhaps fans could exchange virtual credits for exclusive merchandise, offline discounts, or limited-time Facebook gifts. Brands could host contests through Facebook where the prize was a stash of Facebook credits (I’m sure this could be done for the right price) or maybe brands could reach Generation G(enerous) by allowing them to donate Facebook credits to a cause that would translate into offline sales.

“Real” money: You can already order a pizza through Facebook and in the future your fans will be able to see what their friends are buying, shop your collection, and create registries without ever leaving the social network. Even over the last few months, development companies preparing for this specialty have been seeing growth and interest. For traditional retailers this will this allow brands a new sales venue and a host of possibilities for mapping exactly who is purchasing their products. This could also be huge for musicians, small-time artists, or the crafters who currently sell their organic yarn what-have-you on Etsy. Surely Facebook will eventually allow more donations through their Cause applications and so non-profits will also see a huge benefit.

Facebook could be like a virtual mall, a meeting place and a place to purchase food, entertainment, clothes, or any other number of things. If credit cards make shopping feel like a board game (or is that just me?), you can only imagine what Facebook money will seem like. I’m sure that Facebook has a team of lawyers working all the kinks out but I still expect it will be a couple of months until we see this become more wide spread. InsideFacebook is currently doing an interesting series about this kind of monetization and what it means for developers, start-ups, and Facebook users- I highly recommend checking it out since it’s too many links to include here.

Stay tuned next week for the next trend topic: Maps and Hyper-Local Facebook