New Facebook – What the F8?!

Facebook unveiled some revolutionary changes this week, with some of the more profound ones making their debut at yesterdays F8 Conference.  Today, Net Natives have mostly been drinking coffee and pondering how all these updates are going to change things. Here are some of our preliminary thoughts on:

1. Posting Without Liking You
2. Timelines
3. Gestures
4. Social Collaboration
5. Advertising

1.  Posting without Liking You

People can now write on YOUR page without having to like you first! Here’s four key points to remember…

1. Calls to action even more important
   People aren’t obliged to like you – the days of “fan gating” landing pages are OVER (hurrah)!), so don’t bother just having a page which relies purely on getting people to like you. It is still very important to maintain a core audience who want to engage with your brand, so LIKES remain important, but are no longer the core driver. so it’s important to give them as many other (tempting) options as you can. Pages will now have more casual users just browsing them than ever before – so you really need to make an effort to coax them in. Colleges for example should ensure they are using a landing page featuring relevant downloads (prospectus etc), enquiries form, mailing list sign up, photo gallery and so on. Something like this from Farnborough College which has a focus on the like but with multiple alternative calls to action.
2. Make your wall content even more engaging
   You can get your content out to people who hadn’t liked you – provided they engage with you.  Edgerank (the way Facebook decides what content to show in the newsfeed) means the more that people interact with you, and the better your content, the more likely people will see you in their news feed.  This is now independent of whether someone has committed to “like” you – and will open up a much wider potential audience if you do it right.
3. Being the voice of your brand
   At any time, any number of non-likers could be sat on the sidelines, asking questions, commenting on what you share. This is your chance to sell yourself to potentially new fans. Get it right and you may gain further likes/sales/fans/enrolments, always paint your brand in a consistent and interesting manner.
4. The art of moderation
   ANYONE can post on YOUR wall. Whether this is to respond to comments or to remove them if they are offensive, further vigilance is going to be a necessity as the opportunities for Facebook “trolls” have now increased massively.

2. Timelines and how they can be used to enhance Pages

User profiles now have a “Timeline” – effectively a scrapbook of a persons life.  It shows more things the more recent they are, showing less the further back you go, apart from highlights.  The list is populated in reverse chronicle order.  A link on the right allows you to navigate through the years with just a click.

Now whilst Facebook has NOT explicitly stated whether this will be available for Pages – we think it’s almost inevitable that this feature will be rolled out.

At the moment you have an “on the wall” strategy for engagement – and a “behind the wall” strategy for attraction.  The timeline will add to this and act as an organic, dynamic “About Us” page – a new “within the wall” area, if you will.

3. Gestures – New Verbs other than “like”

Facebook have now introduced verbs.  For the last year it has been possible to “like” pretty much any entity (noun, effectively) – this year Facebook has introduced the ability to use other verbs.

“Before we added nouns so you could ‘like’ anything you wanted. This year we’re adding verbs. Now you don’t have to ‘like’ a book, you can say you ‘read it’. Now you don’t have to like a movie, you can say you ‘watched it’” – Mark Zuckerberg

These new “gestures” (as Facebook calls them) offer business users a whole new way of getting their fans to interact with them.  Facebook showcased some news apps that have already been created . They automatically share what a user has “read” and make this viewable by their friends in news feed. The friend then just clicks on the interaction and is taken to the app where they can view the article. Massive viral potential.
This is BIG news for the education sector, for example.  Colleges can ensure that their e-prospectus is seen by people Ticker/Newsfeed/Timeline as having been “read”, helping to promote the brand further.

4. Social Collaboration

With the new Gestures allowing a plethora of interactions, new apps could open up new ways of learning and doing business.  People will be able to share, within the Facebook platform, what they are working on, what they are learning/have learned, and who they are studying with, for example.  We expect a wave of new apps embracing these ideas; if you think about the actions, the apps will follow.  New Facebook will likely be key in bringing about collaboration in many new areas.

5. Advertising

Some of the biggest implications for you as a business is the accuracy with which you will be able to target new customers/students/employees/users… Gestures will allow you to target, for example, people who are currently reading a certain article. This ultra targeted, granular approach will make the Facebook platform more powerful than ever before for advertising.

However – this will require great expertise.  To make the most of this will require ad campaigns to be more creative than ever, targeting people on multiple complex factors which are changing from minute to minute.

We can’t wait to get our teeth stuck into this!