Timeline
Very soon (if you haven’t hacked it already), your profile will be completely overhauled into a sleek new page with large cover pictures, featured actions, certain aggregated information and more. At its core, this Timeline is a chronology of a user’s life on Facebook, with items automatically appearing based on an algorithm intended to capture a user’s most important life events. A few things to keep in mind:
- Some things are grouped together, such as all things a user Liked in a given month.
- The more engaging an action, the more prominently it will appear and remain in the Timeline.
- Users can edit to manually add, remove, feature or de-emphasize Timeline events. In his keynote address at f8, Mark Zuckerberg enthusiastically demonstrated how a user can go back to the year of his birth and upload a baby picture.
- Although historically, major profile changes have often followed similar brand page changes, there is no official word yet on whether brand pages will also be redesigned.
Open Graph and Custom Actions
Last year, Facebook rolled out Open Graph, allowing brands to connect to a user’s Facebook social graph. This year, it rolled out significant changes, allowing app developers to create custom actions using any verb and object related to the activity taking place on the app. These so-called “lightweight” activities can be defined by the app creator and pushed throughout the Facebook experience. Here are the highlights:
- The Open Graph integrates with the Newsfeed, Ticker (described below) and Timeline, making the app a key part of users’ and their friends’ Facebook experiences.
- As users engage, the custom action appears on Facebook. Ex: Jane cooked a recipe from Best Recipes App.
- Changes to the structure of permissions allow a user to give permission one time for an app to post about that user’s activity on the app thereafter.
- Custom actions improve Sponsored Stories in that they can now include more interesting information about an action a user has taken, and similarly improve ad targeting in that brands can direct ads to users who have taken certain kinds of actions. See our previous blog post for more information on how Sponsored Stories work.
Newsfeed and Ticker
Closely related to the Open Graph changes are the Newsfeed redesign and introduction of the Ticker. According to Facebook, ensure that the overall concept behind these changes is to make sure users don’t miss important events, regardless of how often they log in.
- The flow of information to users has been revamped to feature higher quality engagement in a single Newsfeed, a real-time feed of all activity in the Ticker, and improved photo album display.
- The Newsfeed now appears as one continuous feed, with “Top Stories” usually appearing first and the remaining “Recent Stories” appearing below. This adjusts based on how often a user checks Facebook.
- Likes and more minor actions are removed from the Newsfeed but still appear in the Ticker.
What’s a marketer to do?
Now that we know what changes Facebook has made, brands and marketers need to figure out what they mean for social media marketing. Based on our extensive experience running over 150,000 social media campaigns, here’s our take:
- “Likes” are still very important. This is the way brands build their audiences, to whom they can communicate directly, and promotions are the best way to build a fanbase. Sweepstakes and instant win campaigns are best for generating “Likes,” while contests, trivia, group deals and engaging pages are best for fostering engagement.
- Newsfeed vs. Brand Pages. There had been recent talk of apps/tabs/pages decreasing in significance. The f8 changes turn that around, in that deeper, more engaging actions are the ones that will appear in Top Stories and Timelines and are therefore more persistent within the social graph. Prior to f8, to the extent that they appeared in a newsfeed or profile wall, more minor actions had the same real estate as more engaging actions, whereas they are now moved to the fast-moving Ticker.
- Reevaluate your brand’s strategy. Many brands will be able to capitalize on the increased engagement necessary to produce frequent appearances in the Ticker and lasting impressions in the Newsfeed and Timeline, but that won’t work for everyone. If your brand is one where engaging actions aren’t obvious, think about what activities your fans regularly take, and what partnerships or co-marketing could help turn those activities into engaging custom actions on Facebook.
In light of Facebook’s recent changes, Wildfire will enhance our existing Facebook application offerings to take advantage of the new opportunities. Over the coming months, we will work to integrate Open Graph actions into our applications so they will start sending lightweight feeds to Facebook’s new Ticker, and adapt existing applications and develop new ones that will encourage consumers to place apps on their timeline on a regular basis.
What Facebook changes are you most looking forward to exploring? Share your thoughts in the comments, we love to hear from you!
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