Is Facebook a destination for performance marketing or a place for brand marketing? I think the question can be answered by the point of view the marketer has of the platform. Do you believe Facebook is about connections or conversations?

While I assume that most social media marketers would clearly identify with the former, most plan strategy like the latter. For example, it’s common practice to manage a Facebook conversation or engagement calendar however, it is rare to find an organization that is optimizing the results of the engagement to the natural market segments that are priorities of the business. The retailer should know if social connections shop in the .com or real-world store. Franchise organizations should know about the geographic distribution or franchisee alignment of the community. The travel hospitality program should know the alignment of their best social customers and social participation of their best real-world customers.

Facebook as a Marketing Platform offers marketers a wealth of authentic and authorized information to directly utilize Facebook as a performance marketing platform.

Facebook Applications are a hot option for marketers to use in the engagement strategy. They love the ability to produce a landing page in Facebook and control branding like in the .com world where micro-sites thrive. Key measurement is impressions – if you are a brand marketer…

Thinking like a direct marketer I can use both organic and paid tactics to reach my targeted segments to achieve my awareness, recruitment or re-targeting goals. Facebook registers users to the authorized application database and permits discreet query of key information like name, geography, gender, friends, networks, etc. These are key data points to drive performance marketing decisions. Nike, for example, has access to key bits of my social data day and night.

I am a performance marketers dream and a privacy nightmare. I have authorized 293 Apps on Facebook. Of those I have actively used 132 in the past six months. The remaining 55% are “vampire” apps that I have not had activity with in the past six months but that does not mean that those Apps have taken reciprocal muting with me.

(my most recent Facebook App Authorizations)

The message to social media marketers is to maximize your interactions between your connected social brands with the permissions that have been granted by fans and customers. These insights drive our marketing questions:

• Where are your connections?
• Who are your connections?
• Are they engaged with you?
• Are you connected with their friends?

Use of this information discreetly and with care is the trust system that delivers customer value or gets you reported as a spammer. It is a fine line. However, intelligent use of social data to provide high quality engagement opportunities is smart marketing clearly measured by customer resonance.