Outlook Facebook Business Solutions

Will Facebook be able to seriously compete with search and contextual advertising?

Presented in recent months, Facebook Business Solutions look like a small revolution.

What does Facebook offer for businesses?
What non-technical difficulties prevent Facebook from becoming a universal business platform?
What kind of functionality is clearly not enough?

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Facebook’s solutions include:

• free business pages
  
• advertisements embedded in users news feeds
  
• business profile attendance statistics
  
• linking external online purchases to user profiles
  
• sponsored votes
  
• targeting by user profile parameters
  
• Facebook platform allows you to run viral business applications

So, Facebook has become the first universal platform for creating business accounts. I give a controversial opinion: Facebook will not be able to remain the leading business platform .

Facebook Business Solutions strategy has some fundamental limitations:

• The perception of the system. Facebook is a place to chat with friends, not a system of stores and advertisements. All business services are perceived as interference.
  
• Anarchic approach to the selection of services. In the Facebook system, applications independently fight for popularity among users. In the end, business applications outright lose entertainment.
  
• Control over the data. Perhaps some of the businesses (how big?) Would prefer a distributed business platform. Say, like wordpress - for blogs.
  
• Closeness. Hard restrictions on access to data by external services. Global statistics on the system can only lead Facebook, but he does not do it. Each specific application has access only to those profiles where the user has given consent to this and this is clearly not enough.
  
• Lifeless business accounts. For reasons unknown to me, almost all business pages on Facebook do not perform any active actions in the system. By the way, even Facebook itself does not have its own business profile :-)
  
• Limited resources In the coming year, Facebook will have to overcome a management crisis and enter the international market. During this time, the leaders of the web industry (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo) and competing social networks will begin to build alternative business platforms with a greater degree of openness and integration of already existing services.

In addition to fundamental difficulties, Facebook will have a huge job to implement the necessary business functionality. And third-party developers here will not always be able to help.

Technical limitations of the current version of Facebook Business Solutions:

• Facebook business accounts are absolutely useless outside of it. Maybe you should give OpenID to every business? There is no possibility to link other business offices to your Facebook account.
  
• Business accounts are not a standalone entity. They cannot send personal invitations and messages.
  
• Lack of full billing. As a result, business transactions still have to be carried out outside the system. In addition to Facebook identity, the user has to drive in their data in each store.
  
• The lack of integration with niche solutions (product search, vacancies, real estate). It seems to me that Facebook apps do not allow organically integrating these services.
  
• Lack of independent space for each business account. Reviews, reviews, questions and answers in Facebook now there.
  
• Lack of reputation system. In order for users to start doing useful actions (writing reviews, disclosing business preferences) it is necessary to motivate them. Facebook now has no such mechanisms.
  
• Lack of integration with maps.
  
• Lack of universal recommender system. It can not be written as a simple Facebook application.

PS This text appeared in the process of substantiating the Business Network project.