What Facebook’s Recent f8 Changes Mean to Marketers
Facebook has recently announced some major changes to it’s features and layout that will mean some drastic changes for both the average Facebook user, as well as marketers. Currently, we’re waiting to see how big brands will grasp onto these changes and how these will revolutionize the internet (big claims!!).
Here is a summary of the changes and my thoughts on what it means to marketers:
Timeline:
A new kind of profile that shows your Facebook content & the content you interact with in chronological order (from birth). You can add and change this information as you please, and there are associated privacy controls with it. You can add major life events (having children, changing jobs, moving) to help build this out. Timeline is currently being rolled out, you’ll start to see these live on personal profiles on September 30th.
How this will affect us:
- Increased advertising targeting (e.g. possibility to know how many kids people have and their ages to market family specific deals via Facebook ads)
- Timeline layout is expected to apply to Business Pages in the future (allowing for historical information to be added) and a more robust/engaging page layout
- The timeline features various types of multimedia content – Places visited, photos taken, check-ins, tv shows and movies watched, etc. increasing the number of ways we can interact with our customers. Users can add brand applications to their timeline (e.g. add deals they’ve bought; venues they’ve visited Spotify shows when people listened to what song; cooks can add recipes and when they cooked them) – this will result in a new way for customers to share their real-life experiences.
Facebook Gestures:
Developers will now be able to add different verbs to their actions to give more context around the actions people take (e.g. Listen, Watch, Read and custom verbs based on the app’s context). You can now verb any noun i.e. bought a deal or styled their hair.
How this will affect us:
- Users can use these verbs to add stories to their timelines
- Will add an additional layer to the way we interact with our fans/customers if/when we develop applications
- ‘Like’ will begin to have a smaller roll in marketing via Facebook as we move away from only giving an endorsement to a brand/offer.
Newsfeed Changes/Friends List Upgrade:
Facebook has changed the newsfeed layout to include a real-time ticker (to help create real-time conversation), ‘Top Stories’/’Recent Stories’ (allowing you to see the posts with the highest engagement, or the posts that occurred most recently), and an Unsubscribe feature (allowing you to unsubscribe from stories instead of Unfriending or Unliking).
It has also upgraded its Friend’s List feature (in the face of heavy competition from Google+) to include Smart Lists, the ability to share/consume specific content to lists, and the creation of ‘Close Friends’ and ‘Acquaintances’. Facebook now gives you suggestions for who to include in what list, as well as lets you merge your current lists together. The Close Friends list includes a person’s posts more frequently, and the Acquaintances list only shows that person your major updates. There is also an optional ‘Subscribe’ button that allows you to follow someone’s updates without actually being their friend. This is similar to the ‘follow’ feature on Twitter.
How this will affect us:
- The unsubscribe/top stories feature will directly influence our community management efforts - encouraging us to continue to create highly engaging content so that our posts have a better chance of becoming a ‘Top Story’
- Although the friends lists haven’t directly affected marketers yet, there are rumors that lists will be introduced to help classify/categorize brands
- The ticker can extend the life of your posts beyond 24 hours – if someone interacts with content on our page that is a week old, it can still be seen in real time on the ticker
- We can reply real time from the Ticker if you see that someone has engaged with our page
Have you seen any great marketing implementations of the new f8 changes?

