Facebook Marketing Strategy: Let Facebook Do Your Shopping

Now retailers have even more reason to make Facebook part of their Holiday Marketing Strategy — gift cards on your wall.

These gift cards, available from eGift Social, Amazon, and other online ,

It’s a fun, fast way to send real gifts to your friends even if your relationship is largely virtual or separated by miles.

All the sender does is select the gift and Facebook option and recipients get notification on their Facebook wall (if recipients don’t have a Facebook account, they get notification through an email). With Amazon’s gift cards, the SENDER chooses whether the wall post will appear only to the recipient or be visible to their friends.

Starbucks, Sears, and KMart are also selling gift cards from their Facebook Fan pages to encourage social sharing this holiday season.  Click here to see more.  Apple started this trend last Christmas and they were followed earlier this year by Target.  Facebook is also making organizing that group gift for the secretary, teacher, or co-worker’s baby shower easier by using a new Facebook app.

How Facebook Gift Cards Support Your Marketing Strategy

• Increased convenience of ordering gift cards – which means your company gets a bigger share of the consumer’s wallet
• Offers an easy way to organize a group gift for that holiday party, baby shower, wedding, etc — again, this translates into a competitive advantage for your business
• Social sharing — because gifts are visible on recipients’ Facebook walls, giving gift cards this way is likely to go VIRAL this year.
• Transportability – gift cards can be used in online stores (even your Facebook store — which really completes the cycle) or in your brick and mortar store
• Communication options – offering Facebook Gift Cards gives you something to spice up your advertising efforts and the likely Public Relations outgrowth is tremendous, especially for those who are early adopters of this technology.
• Tie-in for Corporate Social Responsibility strategies — you can use your Facebook Marketing Strategy to support your CSR by making donations for every gift card delivered through Facebook.