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.
