Facebook Works on International Growth. Rather Clumsily at That.

If you have a blog that has at least a few dozens of subscribers, I am quite certain you have received various emails inviting you to install a widget or a button that is promised to improve just about everything on your blog and make people stay longer and read more posts at a time.

I get tons of such messages myself but the most remarkable was some blogs rating website that used to bombard me with their emails about how they rated Profy at 4.9 out of 5 and now invited me to install the widget on Profy for everyone to see it (and probably be envious, not sure). Honestly, these messages caused nothing but irritation as I can’t understand why such people think that every blogger will want to brag like a 5 year old child about some questionable rating we receive?

But if a startup is focused on bloggers installing something - be it a widget, a button or anything else - the only efficient way of promoting it is actually contacting bloggers directly and inviting them to install your piece of code. And only when the widget gets enough installations from bloggers around the world, it will probably receive some boost for viral growth and will achieve massive popularity without its creators bombarding bloggers with requests for installations.

But sometimes even the wildly popular widgets or buttons are still treated like they are totally new and are promoted by direct emails to bloggers - even by the brands you’d never expect to be involved in such activities. My recent example actually involves Facebook and its popular ‘Share’ button.

You probably know that ‘Share on Facebook’ button can be installed by online publishers for their readers to be able to click the button on an article or a post (or any web page at that) and share this piece of content with all their Facebook friends - or at least those who happen to track their updates on Facebook. The button can be integrated into RSS feeds as well for readers to share content right from their feed readers in the same manner.

I would say that in this age of massive Facebook popularity the ‘Share on Facebook’ button is one of the most popular social bookmarking tools that are used by web publishers and it can be found on the vast majority of blogs that I happen to read. Now imagine my surprise when I have found out that Facebook is still engaged in the strange activities of promoting the button directly to the bloggers - after I received a promotion email myself.

So I have noticed in my inbox an email titled “Facebook share” from a representative of Facebook international growth team. The email was actually intended to me as an international publisher (as my profile clearly states that I am based in Russia - and the fact that most fans of Profy are actually in the US is probably ignored). The main goal is to introduce me “some tools that are available to online content providers” and focused on the “Share on Facebook” button in particular.

I have been complimented for making the great first step of creating a fan page on Facebook but at the same time I was advised of the powerful tools that will help me drive traffic back to my website from Facebook - the ‘Share’ button that is available for me to grab and install on my blog right away. Too bad I still don’t use it.

And to make me feel even worse I was offered two great examples of how successful the blogs that already use ‘Share on Facebook’ button are as the email referenced TechCrunch and Mashable (I actually used Mashable’s widgets for Twitter and Facebook to illustrate this post) that already use it. Now at least I know that their success is due to them installing the right widgets at the right time!

Now I have to admit that I definitely know all the advantages of actually using the right widgets and bookmarking buttons in the right places and I am quite certain that I will have both Facebook and Twitter buttons finally installed to accompany my content - right after the next Wordpress upgrade. But what I really don’t understand is why exactly Facebook would need to contact publishers in this manner and why they do it so clumsily.

The reason behind them contacting me (and probably thousands of other publishers) is probably the fact that they don’t receive enough installations and don’t reach some targets here - and they do want to get more people generating more and more content-related activities on Facebook making Facebook more content-oriented than it is now with its focus on real news from real-life friends.

So of course if they don’t meet some goals, the reasoning behind the fact of contacting publishers is totally clear but I don’t understand exactly why they would do it so clumsily. My main problem here is the impersonal nature of the email I have received - even despite of the fact that Facebook definitely has all the information the team may need to make such emails more personal.

I don’t care about them qualifying Profy as an international publication most probably for the reason of its owner belonging to Russia. But why would Facebook need information if they can’t even use it properly? Don’t they have the information on the owner of every single fan page that they target in this manner? Is it really difficult to begin such emails with the person’s real name instead of the name of the brand that we choose to promote on Facebook? (Yes, I really hate it when I receive emails starting with “Dear Profy” - after all, Profy is not my own name, it is a brand that I am associated with but it does not make it any more of my name.)

So I really see no problem in Facebook contacting publishers to inform them about availability of various Facebook widgets - after all, chances are there are publishers that somehow are not aware of their availability and will install them when informed. But if they choose direct marketing for promotion, why don’t they make their emails more personal given that they already use our personal information to find our publications and contact us directly?