How Facebook's Platform for Mobile Will Affect Social Commerce

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With the launch of Facebook Platform for Mobile, shoppers can now access Facebook apps and games on a variety of mobile devices and tablets. Businesses, marketers, and developers can leverage a variety of social graph technology that will enable more meaningful engagement anywhere, anytime on multiple screens. This will have a large effect on the social shopping experience going forward.

The hyper-interactive shopper is a new breed of engaged and informed consumer. They are researching, chatting, booking, sharing, blogging, Facebooking, and tweeting every aspect of the buying experience with their friends online, on mobile devices, and in multiple social networks.

This past May on ClickZ, I produced an infographic on the Facebook ecosphere. In reviewing the original infographic for a presentation I am giving at the Mobile Marketing 2011 Conference, it is evident that the Facebook ecosphere is changing fast. We are now looking at Facebook Platform Open Graph commerce that will impact the social shopping experience on mobile, online, and in-store going forward.

A few key features worth noting for social commerce are:

Facebook Platform for Mobile

Facebook Platform for Mobile enables shoppers to engage with friends and the shopping experience through Notifications, Requests, Timeline, and News Feed on Facebook mobile apps. Developers now have access to a variety of social graph features that will enable a new class of social mobile shopping apps.

Facebook Credits Go Mobile

Facebook Credits have arrived for mobile apps. HTML5 developers can use Credits as their payment mechanism for digital and virtual goods inside Facebook mobile web apps.

Facebook Open Graph Beta

With the launch of Open Graph Beta at f8, we can now define Facebook social shopping actions and objects (verbs and nouns). These actions and verbs such as buy shoes, want a car, sell phone, can be shared though the user's Timeline, News Feed, and Ticker. More details on this can be found in last month's ClickZ column "A Facebook Social Commerce Primer."

Facebook Places

With the launch of the Facebook location tab we are seeing Facebook cataloging physical locations for every Facebook Business page. This includes all locations for businesses such as retail stores, food franchises, financial institutions, etc. Brick-and-mortar retailers are integrating Facebook online and in mobile with the in-store shopping experience.

                                                Facebook Platform Open Graph Commerce

There have been a slew of recent commerce initiatives and partnerships that launched with Facebook over the last month, including a Facebook-eBay partnership with the x.commerce platform as well as Walmart Labs that just launched My Local Walmart.

My Local Walmart is available on Facebook.com through Walmart's Facebook page but it is very easy to see how it will move to a Facebook mobile app sometime soon. Consumers can choose their local Walmart location and get served deals and coupons based on their local store.

My Local Walmart video below best describes the features:

In conclusion, it is not about building a mobile app or Facebook.com app, it's about building social apps across all screens that leverage the Facebook Platform Open Graph commerce opportunities.