Facebook's timeline re-engages me and brands need better apps

Yesterday at f8, Facebook’s developer conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced some major changes to Facebook. Now with over 800 million members, astonishingly, Facebook gets 500 million users on a good day.

Mark Zuckerberg in front of the Lifestyle Partners for the new Open Graph

Profile – your HQ on Facebook is now the scrapbook of your life, AKA your “Timeline”

Your timeline scrolls down below in groupings of activities, images, actions and interactions, when you friended someone, where you checked in and with whom. Actions, apps and relationships are presented in little blocks stretching back in time. It’s easy to see what’s happened, and it’s even easier to remove that content if it’s not important to you, or you’d like to remove it.

I’m a reluctant personal FB user – it’s great to keep in touch with family and some friends, but it’s been a long time since I’ve felt some magic, and this Timeline makes me want to fill in the gaps of my life (the timeline starts for me in 2007), and has done a good job of picking out key events and relationships in my life to date. I feel a stronger emotional connection to my Facebook life now than I have had for several years. 

Update your profile to the timeline by following these simple steps from Mashable. How does it make you feel? Post in the comments below.

Zuckerberg stated how it’s been designed for mobile and it looked great on the big screen, but I’m not seeing my new Timeline view on the iPhone yet (this probably needs an app update rather than mobile webpage).

“Likes” are not the only fruit – say hello to “Gestures”

If you’re a keen cook you probably don’t just ‘like’ a recipe, you ‘cook it.’ Gestures mean that you can say you’ve ‘listened’ to a ‘song’ or ‘read’ a ‘book’ rather than just ‘liked’ something. Brands, products and services can create their own actions to boost relevance and forge a connection with their fans/users/customers.

Apps

Apps are now more social with updates from apps able to appear in the news ticker. Apps don’t go to die on the left hand side of your profile, well used ones will appear in your timeline when you use them, with the update being shared in the news ticker... This will aid uptake and sharing of content more than before. Sponsored stories can also take activity directly from apps to be used in ads.

More entertainment will be delivered through Facebook

At f8, Zuckerberg announced partnerships with Film (Netflix), TV (Hulu), Music (Spotify) and News/Media (Yahoo! and others – see pic). Facebook now becomes a social layer over our entertainment lives and sharing. Sharing what you’re listening to on Spotify, for example will be shared with your connections in the newsfeed, meaning more discovery and shared experiences between friends.

See more about Spotify here in this vid from TNW.

Implications for marketers and brands

·         “Engagement” and brand utility – it’s now so easy to remove updates, unsubscribe from activity and apps, so brands have to be even more focused on engaging with customers and providing genuine use – information, fun, incentives, utility. Branded services like Nike+ keep on looking better and better!

·         Enhanced targeting If we can take users' actions from the news ticker for ad targeting, we could e.g. target movie viewers who watch a lot of action movies on Facebook, or Spotify users who play a lot of a band or a kind of genre, or readers of e.g. The Guardian’s news on Facebook

·         More ammo for Sponsored Stories – we’ve covered how important Sponsored Stories are to Facebook’s advertising plans, and the f8 updates will enable much more social information to be used for advertisers to boost the social relevance of advertising

·         Entertainment content delivered on Facebook will probably open up possibility for more formats in time (e.g. VOD pre-rolls), but also sponsorship and loyalty schemes where brands can help fans accumulate Facebook credits to access content  

Industry questions

·         How will the business side of things work for media partners? Referring traffic is one thing but will Facebook share ad revenue around the content? I can see it working well for Spotify, as they will get more paying customers and sharing/referrals, but will accessing editorial content through Facebook mean more paying readers?
I use the paid for Guardian iPhone app, but can if I can access it all for free via Facebook then why should I pay for the next update?

Visit f8 on Facebook

Mashable on key changes

NMA’s take on the announcements

As outlined in Tuesday’s ‘Facebook in a nutshell’ (Carat Manchester industry presentations), we have seen Facebook falter recently in terms of visits and usage, yet it remains the dominant social network in Europe and the Americas (with some exceptions e.g. Orkut in Brazil). We knew entertainment and content delivery was key, and this is a huge signal of intent for the future.

This is a shot in the arm, and then some - no wonder they held off IPO!