Amazon Brand Pages: What You Need to Know

A few weeks ago, TechCrunch published an article about Amazon rolling out “Amazon Pages” for brands. I’ve been following along ever since, trying to figure out how these can be put to use.

Amazon Pages will be home base for brands, authors, artists, merchants, and local businesses on Amazon, where they can customize the look and feel of their pages, display hand-picked products, make posts both to Amazon and Facebook, present other engaging widgets, and view analytics to measure effectiveness. You can learn more and download the PDF guide from Amazon Marketing Services here.

All in all, it seems like Amazon Pages could be a key small business tool as well as present a viable reason for brands and enterprises to spend time cultivating their Amazon presences. As far as I can tell, however, it has been less of a launch and more of an announcement of what the future might entail.

In attempting to register my own page, I found that four out of five options are not yet supported by Amazon. (Authors, artists, merchants, and local businesses are not supported, although brands may currently register pages.)

Scanning for various brands, there hasn’t been much uptake yet. Even the ones highlighted by AMS’s website (Pinzon, Strathwood, and Canon) are not much more than a couple of product galleries — though the templates are based on responsive web design, which is a plus for reaching customers across devices. Still, Canon’s page is probably the most advanced, sporting both a Facebook "Like" button and a video. Not exactly setting the world on fire.

What seems most compelling to me, yet blatantly missing, is where a brand would make a post to Amazon and how users would interact with those posts. Adding a more social element to Amazon that may also link to your other social properties is a very interesting vision. And with Amazon's already-industry-leading product recommendation engine, just imagine how relevant they could become by adding in a layer of your friends' purchases and interests. It also appears that Amazon wants to be good pals with Facebook and Twitter, as their PDF guide claims built-in ways to “Like” and “Follow” a brand directly from a company's Amazon Page.

It will be interesting to see where Amazon takes this notion. I think that over time it could turn out to be an effective marketing tool. How do you think Amazon will manage page posts and a “new” news feed? Will you register a page on Amazon?

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