Despite being announced at the f8 Developers’ Conference in September, Facebook’s new timelines – a new way to present profiles from birth until the present – didn’t start to roll out in earnest until December. However, the momentum of those changes gathered pace with the announcement of the release of 60 new timeline apps last week.
With the new apps, offered by the likes of travel review site TripAdvisor, the recipe network Foodily and film review site Rotten Tomatoes - people will be able to personalise their timelines dependent on their interests. And once the user has loaded the app and decided what they’re going to share with who, their timelines will automatically be updated with their activity in that app in real time.
The potential rewards for brands are obvious. As apps are used, they create a constant stream of viral marketing messages that appear in friends newsfeeds and tickers. Spotify’s music app is a prime example – one of Facebook’s original timeline partners, the music streaming site has netted an estimated 7m new subscribers since its launch. And Facebook announced with the release of these new apps that the door is now open for any brand to develop and submit their own app.
Even if brands don’t create their own apps, there may well be benefits to using existing apps for marketing purposes if they have an established Facebook audience. Private galleries might share, or encourage visitors to share, their collections on art sharing app Artfinder, food brands might create and share their own recipes on Foodily etc.
In addition to this development, Facebook has also announced the rollout of a new form of advertising – Featured Stories. Featured Stories will work in the same way as Sponsored Stories – the ads will only appear to those people who’s Facebook friends have interacted with the advertiser. But Featured Stories will appear, clearly flagged, in the friends’ newsfeeds rather than in one of the advertisng slots on the right hand side of the screen.
Featured Stories will be carefully rationed, at least at first, to one per newsfeed per day but it will be interesting to see what impact they have on click thru rates. Featured Stories also open up the possibility of advertising to Facebook’s growing market of mobile users, although mobile users won’t be included in the initial roll out.
