POV on Facebook product changes march 5, 2012

1. LiveWorld Point of View
New Features for Brands Announced at
Facebook’s Feb 29, 2012
Marketing Conference
March 5, 2012
New Facebook Features for Brands March 5, 2012 Page 1 of 12

2. Table of Contents
Executive Summary................................................................................... 3!
Focus on Pages.......................................................................................... 4!
Page Cover Area Detail ...................................................................................................................4!
Timeline Detail..................................................................................................................................5!
Admin Panel ......................................................................................................................................6!
Personalization of a Brand Page.....................................................................................................7!
Ad and Distribution Options..................................................................... 8!
Offers .................................................................................................................................................8!
Reach Generator...............................................................................................................................9!
Premium on Facebook ................................................................................................................. 10!
Insights ..................................................................................................... 11!
LiveWorld Recommendations.................................................................. 11!
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3. Executive Summary
At its first-ever marketing conference on February 29, 2012, Facebook presented a number
of changes that the company positions as natural outgrowth of its perspective that “Stories
are more powerful than Ads, and a Brand Page is where the brand creates stories that fans
then share and create mini-stories on top of.”
At a big event in New York City, streamed live across the web, Facebook announced new
features:
• Timeline for brand Pages, which allows brands to treat their fans to richer storytelling and
entices users to participate in the process.
• New ad venues that enable brands to reach more fans and non-fans, while monetizing the
Facebook services.
LiveWorld Recommendations
Having looked into the new Facebook offerings, our initial take is that brands should:
1) Embrace your Page and its Timeline, as well as the concept of storytelling. Make yours a
shining example of your creativity.
2) Use the new admin tools to curate and highlight the content on your Timeline.
3) Continue to create engaging stories, earning the attention of your fans with strong
content.
4) Pilot the new distribution methods, tracking the success of your content, and use that
data to decide if you’ll continue to invest in the new methods Facebook provides you.
5) Plan for the resource impact of the additional content you’ll have on Timeline, the need
to watch for and respond to private messages (if you allow them), and the option to
curate user content for featuring on Timeline.
New Facebook Features
Detailed later in this document, the specific Facebook announcements include these:
• Enhanced Pages, with a prominent cover photo option, private messaging between
fans and brands, and better admin controls
• Timeline for brands, a new profile that provides many more options for storytelling
• Personalization of brand pages for individuals viewing them
• Offers, Reach Generator, and Facebook Premium, new advertising and distribution
platforms
• Insights, introduced earlier this year, but reviewed now in light of new engagement
options.
• Permissions for moderators (a feature often requested by brands), which is announced,
but not yet released. Facebook specified that 5 levels will be available.
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4. Focus on Pages
Facebook positions Brands Pages as mission control for your business on Facebook. This is
where you tell your fans who you are, show them your new products and offers, and hear
what they think of what you do — as well as more about who they are and how they use
your products.
Now, it’s also where you can create content that can also be used as ads. Facebook is
providing options for your content to be more widely viewed, with the potential to engage
much larger segments of your audience.
Currently available only on the desktop devices, Pages will also be on smartphones later this
year.
Page Cover Area Detail
The cover area of your page gives far more opportunity for branding than was previously
possible. It includes these features (as illustrated on the next page):
• Cover photo: A large space for photos or graphics at the top of your Page, the cover
sets the style and tone of your page. Because it’s easy to change, you can coordinate it
with your campaigns or change it to be seasonal or timely. Naturally, you’ll want this
space to be as appealing and expressive of your brand culture as possible. Although it
can be changed, it should always be consistent with the cultural tone you’ve planned for
your Page.
• Logo: The logo space, smaller and to the bottom left of your cover, is meant to provide
consistent brand identification. It’s the image that shows when you post, conveying
brand credentials to the users, and so shouldn’t be changed.
• Business Description: A short (2-line) overview of your business, so people can see
who you are and what you do at a glance.
• Apps Panel: Depending on the apps you use on your page, you can put the 5 you most
want to emphasize in this panel under the cover photo. Note that 2 of the 5 have to be
the “About” and “Photos” apps, so take care to choose the most valuable apps for the
other 3 slots. A drop-down menu lets you pick them.
• Messages: Fans have always been able to Like your Page. But if they wanted to send
you a message, they had to write on your Wall, in full view of everyone else on your
Page. Now, just as individuals can do with their Facebook Friends, your fans can send
you a message, and you can reply within Facebook. This gives you a new option for
customer support messaging, and you want to make sure it’s monitored and answered.
(Note that the fan has to message you first; you can’t initiate an interchange.) At this
point, we see no reporting for this feature, which may be a drawback for brands hoping
to use it.
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5. Timeline Detail
Timeline is a beneficial innovation for Facebook brand pages. While it provides a
chronological look at interactions with the brand over time, it also gives you an extraordinary
opportunity to tell the story of your business in a much more robust and visual way. It
shows your brand posts, of course; but you also have these new abilities (some of which are
illustrated on the next page):
• Curate Timeline content. You can decide if fan posts should appear on your Timeline,
but you can also choose which of them appear. You’ll want to pick the best, of course.
• Highlight your posts. You can Star stories, giving them more visual prominence
(across both columns of Timeline), Pin them at the top up to a week, or even designate
some lucky individual as a Fan of the Week.
• Tell your story. Timeline lets you backdate posts. So you now have the option to use
graphics, photos, and text to tell the story of how you got where you are. Fans can use
this historical feature to navigate back and learn about the most important, interesting, or
entertaining moments over the period your brand has been around. For the really key
moments, you may want to use the Milestones feature, which spreads a story across
both columns of the timeline, lending more visibility and importance to the episode.
• Personalization is now provided for people viewing your Page. (More detail on this on
page 7.)
All these features let brands lend personality to Pages, bolstering the potential to entice users
to engage more actively with a conversational and personable brand entity.
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6. Admin Panel
The admin panel offers many options to create the most favorable impression you can. The
new layout is more friendly than it was in the past, giving you a quick view into your Page. It
also has these new features (as illustrated on the next page):
• You have a central place to look at the notifications for your Page, with the ability to
take actions on the posts.
• You can respond to people when they’ve sent you a private message.
• You can peek into Insights to get a top-level sense of how your posts are performing.
• The Manage function lets you edit Page content and view the Activity Log to get an
overview of what’s going on.
• Build Audience lets you share your Page, invite friends to it, or create ads.
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7. Personalization of a Brand Page
Your Page can now appear more relevant to individuals because of new features that make it
easier for them to see how their own circle of connections may be interacting with your
brand Page:
• When people arrive at your Page, they’ll see pictures of any of their friends who are also
your fans.
• Visitors will also see content about you that their friends have shared or initiated — (but
it’s seen only by those visitors, not by all your fans).
• Finally, people viewing your Page can filter posts to see only brand content, only content
about you posted by their friends, or both.
Besides being more interesting for individuals, personalization is also good for brands, as
relevance and credibility come from the implicit recommendations of friends — presenting
potential encouragement to Like your Page. It’s a whole new way for people to “check out”
a brand on Facebook.
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8. Ad and Distribution Options
Facebook introduced some new options for boosting your ability to reach fans with your
discounts and your content designed to spur fan engagement. Pricing wasn’t outlined in the
conference, so we’ll expect that information to be forthcoming.
Offers
Representing a new content type for brands, Offers provides brands with an easy new
vehicle for delivering discounts. As illustrated on the next page, Offers shows users which of
their friends have used the discount. The offer itself can be time-bound, and it’s quite simple
to access and read from both browsers and mobile. Because people can share the offer, the
potential exists for you to reach and sell to friends, their friends, and so on in an efficient
Facebook viral pattern.
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9. Reach Generator
An option that Facebook recommends to be “always on,” Reach Generator content appears
to fans in the Sponsored Stories format, and to non-fans as ads. Reach Generator content is
positioned in the right-hand column of the Home page. Facebook guarantees higher fan
reach, charging a flat fee, depending on the number of fans a Page has. Noting that Reach
Generator is available only to “qualifying clients,” we’d expect it to be pricey.
It’s also important to keep in mind that, assuming no changes to the current Sponsored
Stories format, your update needs to conform to its limited character count, followed by
ellipses. Get the meat of your message across succinctly, or you’ll reduce potential audience
pick-up.
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10. Assuming it is available to your brand, and that your budget allows it, Reach Generator
should boost the potential for engagement of any content you’re currently posting.
Naturally, the more personally engaging the content, the greater effect you can expect.
Premium on Facebook
The Premium package encompasses Reach Generator and some other options. While Reach
Generator is recommended as an always-on booster, Facebook recommends Reach
Generator plus the other Premium components as appropriate for special events and
activities such as product or campaign launches, movie releases, or promotional events. The
additional features include:
• Distributing a post into the Newsfeed of your fans. While it wasn’t specifically stated
at the marketing conference, we assume Facebook is boosting the EdgeRank formula,
forcing the post into the Newsfeed in cases where EdgeRank may have left it out.
Facebook trials indicate an estimated 5-10x click-through rate above a regular brand post
that has no Premium option added. Brands can choose this option for Newsfeed on
both desktop and mobile.
• Feature the post in the Facebook log-out experience. When users are logging out of
the system — and Facebook specified that 37 million people do this every day and 105
million every month in the US alone — they’ll see your content, if you opt for this
feature (which will be available in April).
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11. Four positions are thus available to brands for Premium posts:
• The right side of the Page (either as a Sponsored Story or an ad)
• The Newsfeed on both desktop and mobile (two positions)
• The log-out experience
Your choices will doubtless increase your normal engagement levels. However, using these
options only makes the stakes higher for your content. It’s got to be appealing and enticing
enough to earn Likes, comments, shares, and clicks. Otherwise, you won’t make the most of
your Premium investment.
Insights
While changes to Facebook Insights were released in Q4 2011, it’s worth reviewing them in
light of the new capabilities to increase engagement:
• Your likes and the number of people “talking about” you (engaging with the content you
share) are now visible right on the brand’s page — to you and to everyone. The
information shows up underneath your cover photo. If you’re just “using a bull-horn,”
and not inviting (or getting) much engagement, it will be obvious here.
• Your dashboard shows many different metrics that give you more granularity into the
way your fans engage with your content. For each type of content you post, you can see
its reach — both to your fans and to their friends.
• While Insights provides you numerous interactive graphs, the capability to export via
their data exports offers an opportunity to analyze even more deeply.
The features in Insights track the performance of your content. Paying attention to them is
key to maximizing your ability to create and select the best content for engagement. When
posts do well, do more of those kinds of posts. Even though you’re able to purchase a larger
reach via the new ad/distribution options, you’ll want to make optimal use of those dollars
for the greatest engagement.
LiveWorld Recommendations
For brands on Facebook, it’s still all about your personality, your conversational skills, and
your ability to build relationships with people. Here’s what we’d suggest you do:
1) Embrace your Page and its Timeline, as well as the concept of storytelling. Make yours a
shining example of your creativity. Let the culture of your brand shine through; it’s the
emotional connection that makes people want to connect with you beyond discounts.
2) Use the new admin tools to curate and highlight the content on your Timeline. Find the
best content and un-bury it. Make sure that when people come to your Page, they see
great examples of the regard with which their friends and other people hold your brand.
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12. 3) Continue to create engaging stories, earning the attention of your fans with strong
content. Ask people to engage with you, and give them something to talk about. When
they respond, acknowledge them. Be there for them. Treat your Page like a social venue,
not a marketing brochure.
4) Pilot the new distribution methods, tracking the success of your content, and use that
data to decide whether you’ll continue to invest in them. Look at your most engaging
posts, and decide what they have in common; then do more of them. Compare the
results you get with and without the new options; it may be well worth the money to get
new energy and interest going for your Page, your discounts, your launches.
5) Plan for the resource impact of the additional content you’ll have on Timeline, the need
to watch for and respond to private messages (if you allow them), and the option to
curate user content for featuring on Timeline. To do this well, you’re going to need to
pay attention. Let us know if we can help.
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