MindComet

Your Facebook Page As An Email Design

When one of the purposes of your email is to increase likes / fans of your Facebook page, what design tactics and strategies would you use? Would you design your email in any specific way for the sole purpose of increasing your reach on Facebook?

LA Fitness recently employed—what I thought was—a fairly brilliant design for their Facebook email campaign.

As you can see, their email design very closely resembles their actual Facebook page, all the way down to the site’s standard navigation. This email could’ve been finessed somewhat with better typefaces and logo placement, but all in all it works. Essentially, LA Fitness’s Facebook page landed in my inbox… it’s nothing too complicated or convoluted. Its simple and straight to the point. Sometimes a similar approach is the best solution to your email campaign’s design.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on May. 23, 2011

Facebook Announces A Unique Vision Of Email

After taking an hour to digest Facebook’s announcement of their new email platform I’ve come to my own prediction on one simple point: For now, this will be very helpful for users who are on Facebook all day, but not your average, casual user so much. This also reminds me a heck of a lot of Google Wave. Since Wave was deemed too confusing by the mainstream and ultimately dropped from Google’s radar, you’d think Facebook would take note and not repeat history. For now, we’ll have to wait to see how things shake out.

Here’s a rundown of the new Facebook feature presented earlier this afternoon by Mark Zuckerberg and Andrew Bosworth:

• It’s been in development for over a year and has had 13-15 developers working on it

• 350 million users on Facebook actively use messages, which totals to an average of 4 billion messages per day (consisting of private messages and instant messages)

• Intended to present messaging in a simpler way, delivered in shorter bursts than “conventional” email

• Facebook claims that threading is “archaic” and that “whitelists” are not practical. (I agree with one of those points)

• It will consolidate private messages, IM chats, SMS messages and email into one thread per Facebook user

• The inbox will consist of three levels: “high-signal” important conversations, not so important messages and junk

• Your Facebook username will be your email address. Example: facebook.com/yourname =

• Will be able to with integrate Jabber, Facebook’s API and eventually IMAP

• As they put it, this is “not an email killer”, just a form of more real-time / simpler communication

• Over time, they intend to sync their email system with other email systems, as well as include video and voice capabilities

So that’s the long and short of it.

By the way, what do you think of this? Do you think Facebook Email has the potential to take over “conventional” email as we know it? Will it be a flash in the pan and go the way of Google Wave? Will it not make any difference at all? I’m very curious to hear your opinion!

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Nov. 15, 2010

Use Facebook For Additional Email Opt-Ins

This process is relatively simple and only takes a few minutes to execute. You’re going to need two things in order to do this: a Facebook fan page and an HTML opt-in / sign up form code.

If you don’t already have Static FBML on your Facebook fan page, you need to add it here.  With this app added, you can create an “email list” tab to your page.

Once you add the app, click on “edit page” below your main graphic.


Next, select FBML from your list of apps (click on the pencil, then edit). 


You can edit the tab title in the “box title” field. In the FBML section, paste your form code in. If you have any HTML knowledge, you can edit the form to accurately reflect the rest of the page’s look and feel. Click save changes.

If you or one of your colleagues are having issues with the rendering of the email sign up form, click “add another FBML box”. This should nip it in the butt.

And there you have it. Check it out for yourself!

Thanks for the inspiration, returnonsubscriber! (link)

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jun. 19, 2009

Facebook Opens Email Platform

If you’re currently on the social networking site of the moment, Facebook, you may notice that their email options have widened considerably.  Up until recently, you were only allowed to message to you Facebook friends.  But now they’ve allowed the option to message - quote / unquote - normal email addresses through their system.

The issues inherit with Facebook’s email service is that – as it stands now – no on uses facebook as their sole means of email communication.  Like most people, I check my main email account to see if I’ve received any messages from the social networking site.  Then I log on to the site to actually read the message.  It seems a little convoluted…  for now.  If they add a few key features (such as POP, forwarding, etc), then Facebook has the potential to completely turn the email-marketing world on its head.

Source: The Email Wars

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Posted by MindComet on Aug. 27, 2007