Turning Facebook Fans Into Customers

BOSTON (TheStreet) -- If you're one of the 250 million active users on Facebook, you're familiar with unsolicited messages telling you that your "friends" have "become a fan" of someone or something via a page dedicated to that particular company, artist, product, activity or whatnot. So it's no surprise that, according to Facebook, more than 8 million users join a Facebook fan page every day. And as it turns out, building and joining fan pages is not just a waste of time -- it's also a decent way to sell stuff. To that end, Nimbit, a music industry technology company in Framingham, Mass., on Tuesday launched an application called "Nimbit MyStore for Facebook," which is notable in that it lets artists sell music, merchandise and electronic concert tickets directly from their own Facebook pages. "One of the keys to the industry's future is the direct connection," says Philip Antoniades, president of Nimbit. The new Nimbit app differs from previous social media commerce applications in that the consumer doesn't have to leave Facebook and go to another site, such as Apple's "It puts all the commerce and interaction inside the Facebook environment, makes it viral, and keeps it there," says Patrick Faucher, founder, chief executive and "chief artist activist" at Nimbit. (He stresses, though, that the actual monetary transaction happens on a secure server, so it's not like the fans are notifying everyone on Facebook about their credit card numbers and their mothers' maiden names.) The Facebook fan page phenomenon is one that has increased revenue...
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