For all its focus on finding new revenue streams, Facebook is concentrating on mobile and ensuring that it’s still relevant when its users migrate there for good.

After testing out sponsored stories, app downloads, offers, and promoting your posts for a price, it’s always looking at different ways to increase revenue. With the aim to make mobile just as profitable as desktop, if not more, Facebook has a number of options to experiment with, Instagram being the obvious one, but none that has more potential than its latest app: Poke.

In Practice

The basis for this lies with the very app Poke is based upon: Snapchat. If you’ve been following the latest marketing trends, you would have heard about a campaign based upon this app a few days ago.

For those who haven’t, the brand in question was the frozen yogurt chain 16 Handles, which is based in New York. It’s running a campaign where customers would visit a store, snap a picture of themselves or their friends tasting any of their flavours and send it to the brand’s account.

Once it gets the picture, it would send you a coupon to use the next time you visit. However, since content shared on Snapchat has a short lifespan, the coupon would self-destruct within ten seconds of viewing it. The only way you could claim it was to open it when you were at the cashier and present the coupon.

The clever thing about this is because of the self-destructive nature of the app, the user has no idea what he/she will receive unless they visit the store and claim it. This gives the campaign an element of surprise, which would make the customer more inclined to try it out.

Marketers are always looking for the next big thing, and this campaign gives a glimpse into the massive potential both Snapchat and Poke hold. Poke, however, has all of Facebook’s data to play around with and this gives it a significant advantage.

Improving It For Brands

As the release of Poke proved, Facebook isn’t above and beyond copying ideas if it benefits the company in the long-run. Its large size is the reason why only it, Google and Apple can try out so many different things without it negatively impacting on the entire business. They’re big enough to take risks and if they fail, they can just forget about it and move onto the next project.

In the case of Poke, it was taking an existing, but now rarely used feature, and adapting it for a mobile audience. Apparently, it took Facebook’s developers twelve days to put the app together, and despite the obvious copy, the major thing that Facebook has is almost half a billion active mobile users, most of whom won’t care about where the idea came from. Also, any poke messages can be sent to non-poke app users, prompting them to download the app. This latter detail is vital as it lends itself to some massive marketing opportunities.