Lost in all the excitement over timelines and tickers have been 2 small but significant announcements from Facebook in recent weeks.

The first relates to a complete overhaul of Facebook Insights, the tool that page owners use to judge the success of their page.

For starters, three new metrics have joined the familiar count of overall ‘Likes’ at the top of the Insights page.  These are:

Friends of Fans – a count of all the friends on Facebook of your current fans, taking into account any mutual friends that those fans might have.  It’s a good way for brands to understand what the viral reach of their Facebook campaign could be, whether that be an ad campaign like Sponsored Stories or a viral content campaign.

People Talking About This – this is the number of people who have engaged with a page over the past week. In this case, engagement is defined as Facebook users liking the page, RSVP’ing to an event, commenting on or sharing a post, tagging the page in an update or in a photo or posting to the page’s wall.

Weekly Total Reach – this is the number of people who have seen any page content or ads pointing to the page over the past 7 days.

All of this information is useful at a macro level but it’s the next level of detail down that makes the new Facebook Insights really interesting – the performance of individual page posts.

For the most recent 500 posts to their pages, marketers will be able to see:

- The Reach of that post – the number of people that saw it.

- The Engagement level – the number of people that clicked on that post, including those that viewed videos or pictures.

- The volume of people that Talked About the post – the number of Facebook users who actively engaged with the post, including liking, commenting, sharing, tagging or RSVP’ing.

- The ‘Virality’ of the post – a new metric which will soon enter marketers’ lexicons, ‘Virality’ is merely an expression of the number of people who have ‘Talked About’ a post as a percentage of the ‘Reach’ of that post.

 

 

These new metrics mean that not only will marketers fully understand what proportion of their fan base is seeing their posts, they’ll also understand how much impact those posts are having, and what sort of impact.

By reviewing and analyzing this data, marketers will be understand better what sort of content their fans like to consume and what sort of content their fans like to interact with and pass on to their friends.

In addition, a new ‘arms race’ will begin amongst rival brands as the ‘People Talking About’ metric will also be viewable by any Facebook user who visits a fan page, published below the number of page ‘Likes’. Rival brands will be vying with each other not only for popularity but for talkability.

At present, the new Insights is available by clicking a link at the top of the existing Insights page.

The second significant development is the introduction of a new ad format – the Premium Ad Unit.  In a similar way to promoted tweets on Twitter, brands can turn a page post – be that a message or a video – into an ad.

Echoing the highly successful ‘Sponsored Stories’ format, if a Facebook user’s friend has ‘liked’ the brand advertising, the ad will expand to incorporate that information in addition to the post information.

At present, the new format is only available via Facebook’s direct sales team but we expect it to be popular with advertisers because it combines the advertiser’s message with a social element. It also a larger format ad format which will display on the right hand side of a user’s homepage with no other ads present – hence attracting more attention from users.

When you consider the major changes announced at the f8 conference alongside these recently announced innovations, there’s certainly much for Facebook marketers to consider in the coming weeks.

But for us, the key learning is that brands shouldn’t just focus on building a following amongst their target audiences, they need to have strategies to engage those users, to get conversations going about their brands, in order to recruit new fans and new customers, be that via engaging posts or social advertising.

And as Facebook wants an increasingly engaged user base to boost ad inventory and to sell premium ad formats, it’s doing all in its power to ensure brands have the tools to play their part.

By: Carla Burgess

Posted in Online, Social Networking | No Comments »

If one thing has been constant in Facebook’s short history it’s that the world’s pre-eminent social network is always changing – and change was on the agenda again at Facebook’s recent f8 developer conference.

However, this year’s changes were focused on one goal – dwell time.

With 800m users and growing, Facebook’s leadership team have clearly moved their focus from growth to finding ways of keeping users on the site for as long as possible. As any online publishers will tell you,  people doing more and spending longer on a site means more ad inventory to sell, and more ad inventory means more revenue.

So what changes is Facebook implementing and what opportunities will they create for premium and luxury brands? Let’s go through them in turn:

‘Timelines’

Users’ existing profiles are being replaced with ’Timelines’. 

The new timeline is designed to make available a user’s full history of interaction on Facebook - status updates,  photos posted, apps used and places visited (via Facebook Places).  A user’s timeline will be created automatically by Facebook but they will have the ability to add their own content to to ‘fill out’ their new profile – all the way back to their birth if they so desire.

From a user’s perspective, the change will allow people to create more personalised and deeper profiles that better reflect their own personalities and histories. From Facebook’s perspective, the fact that users will be adjusting their timelines and investigating their friends’ timeslines will mean more time spent on the site. And, of course, all the additional content that’s added by users personalising their timelines will be invaluable to advertisers looking to more precisely target their advertising offerings. 

At present, timelines are only being rolled out to individual users but there have been hints that the change could be introduced to brand pages too in the future. This raises interesting possibilities for premium and luxury brands in particular, offering them an ideal opportunity to explain more of their ‘back story’  and heritage to potential fans.

‘Facebook Gestures’

Despite the ubiquitous nature of the ‘Like’ button, Facebook has acknowledged that it’s not appropriate for all occasions. So partners and developers will soon be able customise the button to include any verb that is appropriate.

So instead of ‘Like’ing, Facebook users could be ‘Read’ing (newspaper or magazine articles or books), ‘Listen’ing’ (to music) or ‘Watch’ing (TV or movies). 

The introduction of more relevant verbs for social sharing buttons could see an explosion in their usage - potentially annoying for friends who’ll see more of this sort of activity in their newsfeeds but further excellent data for premium and luxury advertisers when defining audiences for their advertising.

More sharing means more peer influencing – buying books that friends are reading or downloading music that others are listening to. And there’s also the opportunity for brands to more overtly grease the wheels of social commerce – for example, by adding ‘Want’ buttons to sites so users can build up their own wishlists of products for special occasions or birthdays. In addition, these greater opportunities for user and brand interaction will create more relevant content for the sponsored stories ad format - giving brands greater opportunty to effectively ’spread the word’ virally to the friends of their fans.

Media Partnerships

One way to get users to spend more time on your site is to give them less reasons to leave it. Facebook has done exactly that by signing up a raft of media partners so users can watch TV (on Hulu), listen to music (on Spotify) and read the news (on the Guardian or The Indie) without having to leave the site.

The benefit of this innovation is not just in the extra time Facebook users will spend on the site but all the extra data that will be gathered on users media preferences and the way they interact with that media. The movies people watch, the music they listen to and the articles they read can tell advertisers alot about whether a particular user is of the correct profile for their product, allowing Facebook advertising to become even more targeted.

The Ticker

Facebook has recognised that the more interactive that users become with the service, the more their friends newsfeeds will become clogged up with information which isn’t that important or interesting – like a friend’s progress in Farmville, for example.

So all of this ‘background information’, particularly interactions with apps, will migrate to a ‘ticker’ – a real time rolling feed of what a user’s Facebook friends are doing at that very moment.

Of course, the fact that it’s real time gives users the opportunity to do things together. As interactions with Facebook’s new media partners will be shared via the ‘ticker’, friends could listen to music or watch movies together, using the chat feature to compare notes as they go.

And premium and luxury brands could create apps to leverage this oportunity for real time interaction – allowing friends to go on virtual shopping trips together for example. 

 

For premium and luxury advertisers, there’s much to welcome about the changes that Facebook have introduced.  They’ll be more inventory available, at least in the short term, and a richer pool of user data to mine to more precisely target advertising offerings.

But they’ll also be more opportunities for brands to engage with users, and greater rewards for brands that seize those opportunities. 

Just as Facebook has changed it’s emphasis from building a following to deeper interaction with its users, so brands will be rewarded for changing their strategy too – from a focus on ‘Likes’ to a focus on meaningful engagement. The challenge will be in dreaming up ways to more deeply interact with fans – to become part of of their daily experience of Facebook. To fail risks becoming an irrelevance on the world’s leading social network, and as Facebook grows and dominates more of its users time online, that’s not a place that many brands will want to go.

By: Carla Burgess

Posted in Online, Social Networking | No Comments »