Facebook Introduces Offers, Share exclusive offers only with Facebook fans for free!

It appears that in a bid to become advertiser friendly, and get closer to delivering ROI, Facebook has introduced Offers. With this option, brands can now provide exclusive offers to their Facebook fans via status updates. Facebook evidently also hopes that these posts will be further promoted by brands to reach a larger audience.

This is how it appears on the page next to Status Updates:

The way in which you post an offer further has 3 options:

This appears to be in beta as not all brand pages have it, so don’t be surprised if your brand page is not showing up this option. May be you could contact your Facebook relationship manager to get this enabled for you.

The brands we stumbled across using this feature is the etailer brand Fashionandyou.com and firstcry.com on its fan page.

Once a fan avails of an offer, you get further visibility as their engagement becomes known to their friends.

Clearly Facebook is exploring newer and relevant means to appeal to the brands that are using its platform to engage with an audience, and hoping that these measures will help to increase advertising spends on the social network. After all with General Motors announcing that it was pulling out of Facebook, did send ripples in the market questioning Facebook’s advertising’s efficacy.

Further unlike a Google that has been focusing its sales pitch on ROI, the social network has had done little to build and market advertiser-led case studies , even while it attempts to assist marketers with analysis at a click on the reach and engagement your Facebook initiatives have managed to achieve.

But the real question is that just like Google’s practices that can be questioned particularly when it comes to PPC, and its algorithms can regularly challenge many an SEO expert (search engine optimization) equally challenging is Facebook’s own mechanisms of ensuring that a limited number of users only can see your posting. Facebook has the Edgerank.

Not more than 16 per cent of your Facebook friends can see a wall post or status update. While you can adopt various strategies to try to increase the reach, fact is that all of this requires more hard work and resources, and use the `promote‘ feature and `offers’ feature might just help you reach many more of those audiences faster!