Few weeks ago we revealed our plans to provide SMS-services for Facebook. This week the services are available. But why are we making services for social networks?

Social networks are developing into open web portals, where in addition to personal profiles we can find presence of bands, companies and other organizations.
In these portals people can make their pages more original and interactive with different widgets. We find that this could be beneficial to the profile owner as well.  So from now on you can add SMS services to your Facebook profile or page. Since we see a huge potential in mobile services in social networks, these services won’t be the only ones.

Check out our new service and make money in Facebook.

Nowadays people are using actively different social networks to communicate with other people - meet new friends, old classmates, future husbands and wives. Fortumo thinks that people should have a chance to make their profiles more original and interactive to increase their social capital. At the same time this could also be useful to the profile or page owner, why won’t you add SMS services to your Facebook profile or page and make money with that.

Could anybody point out different Facebook applications that are enabling to monetize profiles and pages?

At least Fortumo will launch new services for Facebook really soon, but stay tuned because Facebook isn’t the only lucky one.

A few days ago social networking site Facebook announced mobile extension to its popular developer platform. Great move, as mobile is definitely where things are going these days. However, it seems that it’s not very stable yet, and they have rushed a bit to get this news out.

In addition to showing snippets of information on the Facebook mobile page (m.facebook.com), application developers could use the API to add SMS interaction to their applications. SMS is great for allowing instant communication with the users wherever they are. However, it has also proved of being one of the most accessible and convenient ways to collect micropayments from users. There are several success stories of social networking sites in Europe, that have made fortunes using one or two simple premium SMS services neatly tied to the otherwise free website. For example, you can make your photo appear on the front page for some time, by sending premium SMS costing let’s say €1. This amount is then added to your phone bill and mobile operator is sharing the revenue with the website.

Eric Eldon from VentureBeat wrote:

Mobile apps may be a good way to monetize, though, Shen [RockYou co-founder Jia Shen] tells us: “Lots of people are thinking about how to run micropayments through phone bills” as high schoolers don’t have access to credit cards for doing things like buying Facebook’s virtual gifts.

At its current version though, Facebook Mobile API does not seem to support premium priced SMS, nor do they share any revenue with application developers, but I’m sure they’re thinking about it. As contextual advertising does not work, I think that SMS could become one of the easiest ways to monetize Facebook apps.