Facebook offers stickers for offline social media marketing

Facebook is distributing window decals for local businesses that instruct passersby to send a text message to indicate that they "like" the business, according to a recent report by Technorati.

A sample of the stickers were sent to the online publication Mashable by the Museum of Making Music in California. Mashable says that it's an indication that Facebook is taking their "like" feature seriously, to allows users to share their approval of any entity imaginable, including local businesses.

Facebook told the sticker recipients that businesses see a 20 percent increase in consumer connections when using offline social mediamarketing strategies, according to Mashable.

Social media expert Don Martelli writes for Technorati that Facebook realizes social media needs to be couple with offline marketing strategies to successfully court an audience.

"This move by Facebook is proof positive that online engagement strategies need offline counterparts," says Martelli. "Social media marketing can't work in a vacuum and in order for the machine to do what it needs to do - engage audiences - it needs to work in tandem with offline counterparts. The offline counterpart is a simple direct marketing initiative."

Twitter is also expanding its marketing efforts. The social media network recently announced that it will start offering Promoted Tweets, that are placed within a users search results.