Affinitive’s Social Media Playground

Mark Zuckerberg made some important announcements affecting marketers at the f8 event yesterday, in particular TIMELINE, Facebook’s new ‘history of your life’ feed solution to the problem of a user’s social activity being lost to the bottom of the feed. Another major update included ‘Verbs’, contextual actions to the Like button such as Cooked, Watched, Read, Listened, etc. adding more depth to the sharing of objects a user interacts with.

Source: BusinessInsider.com

The introduction of the Ticker, a light-touch version of the news feed for less important updates, and ‘Graph Rank’, the new algorithm supporting Edge Rank that weights news feed items using your perceived interests, were also major announcements for marketers. Other updates included new permissions for ‘frictionless’ (read: automatic) publishing of content to a user’s stream, major media partnerships with Spotify, Netflix, Washington Post, etc. and more.  Catch all the updates on TechCrunch here.

This is the beginning of Facebook’s effort to create and surface ‘stories’, bite-size engagements, actions and content that together make up who you are and how you express yourself online. Facebook indexes everything you do to create a self database, your life story. Add to that the automated publishing of your expressions, and the gap between who we say we are (cognizant actions) and whom we really are (incognizant actions) begins to close.

How Does This Affect Brand Marketers?
First impressions on how these new features will affect how brands market on Facebook:

1. This will likely make it more difficult for some marketers to engage as consumers become more cautious or careful about who and what they interact with. “Does this interaction represent who I am?” Is now a more relevant question to ask as the famous internet adage that what you do and say online lasts forever becomes visible in the TIMELINE.
2. Millions and perhaps billions more stories will now be created and fed into TIMELINES, News Feeds and Tickers. Brands are now in more competition than ever reaching consumers on Facebook, meaning loyalty, advocacy and evangelism become enormous advantages for making a customer’s TIMELINE.  That, and having the money for Sponsored Stories, which will prove to play an even more important role in reaching consumers.
3. Brands will now be in the business of building stories, going beyond the one-on-one dialogue, the comment and the Like. Brands will look to build experiences that create opportunities for customers to share and populate their TIMELINE in new and interesting ways. Applications will play a key in staying relevant on Facebook (this includes integrating apps into other platforms and sites outside the Facebook environment.)

It will be important for brands to focus on the story, and provide customers with the tools, actions and experiences that empower them to tell that story. What happens on the Page Wall will always be relevant as long as you’re making real and true connections with customers, but it’s getting those customers to then go out and create more stories through opportunities you provide (apps, buttons, etc.) that will drive success on the new Facebook.

What do you think about the new Facebook changes?