Brands on Facebook in 2012 – What’s the Story?

By Tim Dawson at December 20, 2011 | 5:47 pmPrint

The latest changes to Facebook go far beyond the re-purposed profile pages in Timeline. It is the power that the new Facebook Apps unlock that will drive the most significant and lasting changes to how brands interact with their audience on social media. The critical new App permission ‘Post to Facebook as You’ is already a game-changer for content providers such as The Guardian. Product-driven brands must now ask themselves ‘what’s the story?’

At Facebook’s f8 conference this year Mark Zuckerberg announced a raft of important changes to the platform. He also boasted a new membership milestone for Facebook, with 800+ million people now signed up to the world’s largest social network. While the sheer number of Facebook users is staggering, it is the fact that half of them accessed their accounts within 24 hours of each other that really blows the mind. And, despite the customary grumbles that this round of changes is sure to be met with, all of them are used to things changing.

Perhaps the most immediately jarring change for users will be the new profile format, Timeline. It is Apps, however, that are likely to be the significant driver of changes to the way brands engage with social networks and the people that use them. This post briefly outlines the recent updates before asking how product driven brands can learn from the content providers hand-picked by Facebook to lead integration with their new App platform.

Timeline

Descriptions of Timeline have varied from the cute ‘digital scrapbook’, to the more emotive ‘lifestream’, as well as the downright ‘it’s a bit creepy’. The content is structured around a combination of key moments, highlights and cleverly aggregated stories derived from users’ interaction with the site over the lifetime of their membership.

Timeline is rolling out to users now. You can see a range of screenshots and a breakdown of the new features on Mashable’s excellent Timeline round-up.

Ticker

The new Ticker is a real-time glimpse of user, App and now sponsor-generated stories – ever-present on all Facebook screens. It acts as a sort of filter for the seemingly familiar, ever-tweaked Newsfeed, itself based on an updated algorithm that now gives more weight to ‘patterns’, or clustered friend activity, when serving stories.

Ultimately the Ticker maintains a sense of discovery while allowing brands to publish more content to Facebook without cluttering the Newsfeed of their fans with stories that aren’t relevant to them or their networks.

What the new Facebook Apps can do for brands

Timeline and Ticker do represent a significant shift in the way Facebook envisages us engaging and identifying with social media. But it is the changes to Apps and the access to the Open Graph (read: access to everything) that will likely become the driver of the most radical changes to how brands engage with their audiences on Facebook and on their own websites.

More flexible permissions, including the transformative new ‘Post to Facebook as You’, allow branded Apps to generate stories ‘on behalf of’ users whether those individuals are logged in to the App on Facebook, performing an action on an external site or not online at all.  For example, an airline like Jetstar could potentially post on behalf of a passenger that they are ‘taking off to Fiji’ even though that person is not online at the time – such are the scope of the new permissions. These stories then surface in the Ticker and, brands hope, on the Newsfeed of a user’s friends.

Social, Content + Brands

Social networks are changing the role and nature of content. The Guardian, Hulu, Spotify and Foodspotting were all selected as launch partners for the new Facebook Apps because people are used to sharing the kind of things they naturally do on these sites. News, film, music and food are four of the great real-life conversation starters – forgetting the weather, local sports teams and Justin Bieber. The early success seen by The Guardian (4 million app installs since September) and Spotify (close to 11 million) lay down a road map for local content providers like The Age and the recently launched JB Hi-Fi Now service.

Online content providers fit neatly into Facebook’s new ‘feedback loop‘. Product-driven brands need to recognise that when people share this content they are sharing more than a video, song or article. People share their experience with the shared object and absorb it into their digital ‘lifestream’ – a recipe read, a song listened to or a movie watched/reviewed. The story of that person’s experience becomes engaging content in its own right and it is interacted with by others in their social sphere. The real-time communication of these stories only makes them resonate more across the open graph.

Every product tells a story

Nike is a consistent digital innovator and has recognised the need to integrate their offering into user-generated content. Nike Running allows users to share the progress of a jog metre by metre through a Facebook-integrated mobile app. Enthusiasts receive audible cheers in their headphones every time a friend real-time ‘Likes’ their effort.

The humble jog does not make for riveting content in its own right (crowds certainly don’t gather when I strap on my Air Max) but it can make a good story. Admittedly Nike has an element of cool (not to mention deep pockets) that gives it an advantage in the social space, but the point is that people talk about driving, flying and even taking public transport as much as they talk about rocking round the block in trainers. Thinking this way, the opportunities for Visual Jazz brands like Holden, Jetstar and others start to become apparent. Creating online stories from on and offline engagement with brands is the goal.

If you liked that, you’re going to LOVE this

Facebook has an incredibly good record of convincing their users to grant them access to more and more personal information. Couple this with the powerful new insights brands can glean from those users and the opportunities multiply. Sponsored stories are now more powerful and relevant than ever. Holden could sponsor a story about their new Cruze Hatch to someone who read a small car review on The Guardian, or Jetstar could show tailored specials to people who used a travel or weather app to research the weather in Vanuatu over January.

Measuring effectiveness

All of the changes are set against a backdrop of significantly advanced analytics capabilities within Facebook. Brands will measure engagement or ‘virality’ more effectively and on a post-by-post basis and will quickly come to terms with the reality that having a lot of fans no longer means social media success.

Brands must approach all of these opportunities carefully and strategically. They will need to use their expanded access to people’s information in a way that is relevant to their interests and allows them to generate stories that are compelling to themselves and their networks. Relevance remains king as the line between too much and too little social content is getting finer. Getting the balance right is crucial as more than ever Facebook represents an enormous, highly engaged and scarily measurable audience for brands to interact with, learn from and target.

Good stuff Strategy