Marketing in a Post-IPO Facebook World

Facebook has finally done what analysts have speculated upon for years. Wednesday, it filed for an initial public offering with a stock valuation between $75 billion and $100 billion.

Before the big announcement, Forrester Research's Nate Elliott wrote a column for Forbes speculating on what the move will mean for the marketing industry.

He noted that Facebook's current marketing platform has failed to increase user engagement rates for branded pages, "and most large marketers tell us they simply haven’t gotten much value from their Facebook investments." In order to drive meaningful growth in its marketing division, the company will need to develop marketing metrics that give ad agencies insight. It will also have to start mining the wealth of data is has to facilitate targeted advertising, Elliott comments.

On the subject of data, he points out that government regulators pose a major risk for Facebook as it strives to create innovative uses for its data. It will also work to strengthen its position in markets beyond North America, where it already dominates, to Asian countries and emerging economies that use other social media sites more, Elliott predicts.

In the meantime, how can marketers working on brand development derive value from their social media marketing efforts on Facebook?

According to Nishad Ramachandran, writing for FirstPost, "Facebook is the ultimate loyalty engine," meaning it's still very important to the majority of its more than 840 million users. This drives up the engagement opportunities for brands, allowing them to reach a wide audience of consumers who spend up to 20 percent of their online time viewing social networking sites.

Ramachandran says that analysts and marketers watching Facebook should not be concerned about the slower growth of the ad business - consumers may end up being more loyal because they know the company is not just in it for the money, he cites founder Mark Zuckerberg as saying.