Facebook Changes and New Opportunities for Social Marketing

Point of View from Natalie Vasilyev, The Net Impact Web Marketing Team

Recently Facebook announced their new updates, which not only change how users interact with the social site, but how brands market on Facebook. During the Facebook f8 conference, Facebook presented new ways for users to engage, share, and express themselves. Marketing opportunities on Facebook are growing, and today more than ever brands need to develop a strong holistic social media strategy as a main focus of their marketing plan. Creating relevant, targeted and interactive content is the key to a successful Facebook strategy.  What are these changes and the opportunities they present?

The News Feed Ticker

The News Feed Ticker located on the right side of the page provides comments, posts, likes, friendships, and events from the user’s friends, pages and subscriptions. The ticker will notify individuals of their friends’ interests in real time with updates on what they are watching, listening to or reading. Friends can comment on the ticker posts, and their comments will show in the “activity stories” section. Getting brand mentions in people’s comments is priceless; it shows brand interaction and users’ experience with that brand. Brands need to take advantage of these opportunities and follow up with all mentions regardless if their message is good or bad.   Leaving a bad message without a follow-up can create a negative impact in the social word, but addressing it with a successful outcome will show users the length that the brand is willing to take to guarantee customer satisfaction. Subscribing to a social media monitoring tool is recommended to simplify and automate the process of responding to user comments.

Smart Lists

Smart lists are groups created by users to categorize their friends; it is located on the left side of the page. Facebook automatically creates several lists: close friends, acquaintances, work, school, family, and your city. Some find it hard to maintain these lists accurately with new friends since Facebook doesn’t automatically place new friends in a group aside from the “your city” group which populates based on the geographical settings defined by Facebook or the user.

The News Feed

There are two major changes to the news feed: top stores and recent stories. Top stories appear first and are stories Facebook thinks a user is interested in based on their past interactions, and recent stories are listed in chronological order. Users and marketers alike have had mixed reactions about this change. There has been some user confusion as where to find relevant postings as well as marketers indicating that user engagement has decreased. On the other spectrum, some users are ecstatic about the new format while brands are implying that interaction has lifted. Facebook has been known to get heat for their formatting changes, but it always seems that users and marketers prefer the alterations once they become more familiar.

The Subscribe Button

The subscribe button allows users to make their personal account more public. Users can create public pages and share them with a wider audience. This change is great for people who are very engaged with Facebook and want to have their profile connect with more people. Users or brands can also subscribe to others if they have subscription button on their pages. One other benefit of a subscription: it allows the user to publish to an unlimited number of subscribers and fans.

Timeline

Currently in beta, the timeline will completely overhaul the ever changing profile page. The timeline has been described as a personal scrapbook of a user’s life. The timeline is a collection of all posts, pictures, videos, status updates, the apps and the places the user visited in chronological order, going all the way from birth to present time. Marketers can keep an eye out for this feature in the future. If and when Facebook adds the timeline to business pages, it will allow brands to tell a genuine story which would undoubtedly increase engagement.

Facebook Gestures

No longer will a user be required to only “like” something; in fact, soon enough the “like” button will be ancient history. Facebook gestures allow Facebook’s partners and developers to turn any verb into a button. This creates a tremendous opportunity for brands to get creative and get users involved with their brands by “watching” or “admiring” their product.

Facebook is bigger than ever with an estimated 800 million active users and about 500 million visitors per day said Zuckerberg after the conference. The social world is foreign ground for many advertisers, but ignoring it will deny business opportunities and create challenges in the future. Interactive and engaging content is a key in Facebook advertising. Digital marketing continues to change how advertisers use their marketing dollars, and social advertising continues to gain bigger piece of the pie.

Sources:

http://mashable.com/2011/09/22/facebook-changes-roundup/

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/five-facebook-changes-and-what-you-need-to-know/

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=159526