Facebook Has the Audience, But Your Website Has the Content: What To Do?

In a great guest article last week in Forbes, Listening To Social Media Cues Doesn’t Mean Ceding Control, Gigya CEO Patrick Salyer discusses the problem facing most marketers:  while creating multiple social identities has afforded a company to extend its reach and find new customers, it has become increasingly difficult to keep those customers engaged.

Companies have spent billions of dollars in the creation, deployment, maintenance, and measurement of their wholly-owned web properties to support their brands, products, and services — which often include e-commerce capabilities — and ceding control to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn is something marketers simply do not want to do.

Social infrastructure, or the technology that makes web properties more social, aims to provide a solution to this marketing problem.  Offering social login, for instance, facilitates engagement with a website — no more registering or remembering a new password — and all the while allowing a marketer access to a user’s social profile and preferences.  Behaviors are tracked, and a marketer can decision the right mix of content — products, articles, videos, even advertising — to display to the user.

While many consumer entertainment sites, such as those maintained by cable networks like MTV.com, are all about social login and other social plugins, more and more B2B companies are leveraging social infrastructure to understand their audience of clients and prospects much better.  And on today’s digital age, as any company with a website is now considered a publisher, even companies that sell to a B2B audience can offer the right mix of information to the right user.

To that end, a Sign on with Facebook for a B2B company would hold little value.  Instead, there is Sign in with LinkedIn and soon, watch out for Sign in with Salesforce.com.

Offers Salyer of Gigya,

But rather than cowering in fear at the new uninhibited consumer or simply trying to manage the online conversations that take place outside of your business’s Web properties, you can embrace technologies that help you maintain control of your brand and understand your customers like never before.