I have previously written about “Three No-Brainers that are No-Shows on Facebook Pages for Internet Marketing.” In that post I detailed some aspects of Facebook Pages that limit the feature’s utility for effective social web marketing.
Mashable’s post “Facebook Needs Its Own Version of the Twitter Retweet” points out another area where Facebook lacks the viral power needed before marketers or message spreaders can consider it a serious tool for their needs: there is no way on Facebook to easily share content posted by a friend. Sure, you could copy and paste it into your own status message, but that’s so 1990s. Plus even if you do that, unless you make the extra effort, there is no credit back to the original poster. Twitter’s RT (ReTweet) convention (where you begin a share of someone else’s content with “RT @usrname” with “usrname” being the Twitter ID of the original poster) is one of the most effective way to build interested followers. I know of many cases where present followers followed one of my accounts because of something of mine ReTweeted by one of their friends. And most Twitter clients make posting a RT a one-click process.
While Facebook may be sensitive right now to the accusations that it is trying too hard to be like Twitter, this is one function they simply can’t ignore if they want to achieve their goal of being replacing Google as the center of the web universe.
