The Facebook Mobile: Why It Could Become the World's Most Powerful Marketing Platform

In October of last year, Bloomberg wrote that Facebook is launching a phone.   According to reports, Facebook is teaming up with INQ, a London based mobile phone manufacturer that got its start with a Skype phone, and is aiming to launch in Europe during the first half of 2011 and US towards the end of the year.  The phone is also rumored to come with Spotify built in.

Of course, using Facebook on our mobiles is nothing new.  Facebook has long been one of the most downloaded apps for both the iPhone and Android.  However, Facebook’s objective with this launch would likely be to re-define how we use our phones around social media and Facebook.

For starters, our Facebook profiles replaces phone numbers as our primary identity on the phone.  All our communications, from calls, to texts, to IM, to emails would be consolidated on our profile, significantly improving Facebook’s ability to map our social graph.

All other activities that we currently do on our phone could also be organized around our Facebook profile.  E.g. our camera could be synced, so that all photos automatically upload to our profile.

Building Spotify into the phone could also be a transformational move.  Spotify already enable its users to connect through Facebook, making music a truly social experience.  By integrating Spotify in the mobile, Facebook could alter how we listen to music on the fly and directly challenge Apple’s iPod.  If this model was to succeed for music, there is no reason why it could not be extended to other media, such as TV shows, movies and magazines.

Moreover, payment companies have long attempted to leverage the data it captures from their customers’ purchases to develop marketing solutions for its merchants.  Cardlytics has perhaps developed the most advanced solution for this yet.

We are also seeing the emergence of companies, such as Foursquare and Gowalla, that track our movements and target marketing messages accordingly.  Groupon and Living Social have also announced that they are adding this feature to their offers, and Facebook, of course, already has Places.

As we use our mobile phones to conduct more and more of our real life activities, from payments, to ticketing, to key solutions, our phones will capture an unprecedented amount of data about our lives and enable us to map behaviors and preferences with incredible precision.  Ownership of or access to this data will clearly be hugely valuable.

It is therefore no wonder that Facebook is keen to get more deeply involved with mobile phones and attempt to re-define how we use phones around social media and Facebook.