Implication of Facebook F8 Conference for marketing

Last week Facebook announced several important changes to their user experience and  Open Graph at their annual f8 developer conference. Those changes have important implications for how users consume and share content, how brands need to approach content development and seeding, and how 3rd-party sites and applications should integrate Facebook sharing via the Open Graph API.

Here is a link about the keynote of Facebook changes: http://www.livestream.com/f8live/video?clipId=pla_0b68074c-8f61-47bd-9348-f41bafc59c25

Kevin Briody concluded the notable changes:

For users:

Timeline: The most visible change for Facebook users will be the introduction of the Timeline, a completely redesigned user profile experience that creates a personal blog or lifestream-type experience. Timeline surfaces historical updates sortable by year and content type (e.g. all photo updates), and allows users to curate their content to highlight important events or stories, while featuring visual content such as photos and video much more prominently, including a custom header image set by the user.

Ticker and News Feed: Just prior to f8 Facebook updated the News Feed for most users, highlighting Top Stories and creating the Ticker, a sidebar of realtime updates of friend activity such as Likes, comments, app activity, and so on. The Ticker is central to Facebook’s concept of realtime serendipity – the ability to discover new content and interests shared by your friends on a continuous basis.

For developers:

Frictionless Sharing with Apps: In addition to new layouts and Timeline/News Feed options, Facebook announced a goal of creating a frictionless experience for users when it comes to sharing via apps. From a user perspective, this means instead of your app experience being constantly interrupted with prompts to Share or Like content, you’ll just have to opt-in once, after which the app automatically shares your activity to Facebook.

Contextually Relevant Like Buttons: The Like button is getting some friends, apparently. Also as part of the push into the lifestyle and media spaces, Facebook is updating the Open Graph to enable the creation on 3^rd-party websites with more contextually relevant feedback buttons for media such as Listened, Watched, and Read. These buttons will behave similarly to the Like button and push updates to user Tickers along with News Feed and Timeline (if deemed “meaningful” by GraphRank). They are designed to more intelligently display what a user is doing with content, as Like isn’t always an appropriate description. For e-commerce sites, a Want button is also potentially coming, per Facebook.


What it means for marketers

1. The quality bar for brand content is higher than ever
Taken as a whole, the various changes Facebook announced will likely result in a massive increase in the volume of user sharing activity, and a higher bar for content that  makes it into a user’s Timeline or Newsfeed. Navigating EdgeRank – Facebook’s algorithm for determining what makes it into a user’s News Feed – has always been a focus for anyone driving Wall content, and with the increased noise and filtering, crafting that content to stand out will be an even greater challenge.

2. Apps are more relevant than ever for driving sharing and social spread
Though frictionless sharing may mean more noise generated by 3^rd-party apps, it also means more opportunities for well-designed apps drive sharing activity across Facebook friend networks. Apps will no longer need to focus on incenting multiple sharing actions during use, but instead on being interesting enough to start using (and allow sharing the first time) and on generating compelling updates to the user Tickers.

3. Opportunities for advertisers are changing and deepening
Thanks to the new, contextually-relevant feedback buttons (Read, Listened, Watched) that will be taking their place alongside the now ubiquitous Like button, advertisers should have a range of new targeting options available based on user media consumption history. If the Want button becomes a reality, the targeting opportunities for brands increases dramatically.

Josh Constine provides a list of potential business opportunites:

• A concert venue could target all users who said they listened to band to sell tickets for that band’s upcoming concert.
• A band could target all users who listened to one of the songs off their soon to be released album about that album going on sale on iTunes
• A big box retailer could target all users who shared or said they watched any movie starring Johnny Depp to sell a new DVD box set of the actor’s films
• A film studio could target any user who said they watched a trailer of a new film that a friend shared after watching it on IMDB.
• A tech conference could target any user who said they read an article on any of the major technology blogs
• A baby clothing retailer could target any user who said they read on article about how to buy clothes for infants on a blog for mothers.

 It will be a great start of Facebook. What do you guys think?