The New Facebook Layout (for Marketers)
- Details
- Author: Bennett Wetch
- Thursday, December 08, 2011
Be sure to read Part 1, The New Facebook Layout for Users.
As the noise in the new feed increased and the quality of interactions decreased, marketers also felt their ability to engage with consumers to be increasingly limited. They too were lost amongst the noise.
Facebook provided no shortage of favors to marketers in this new layout. While there has been much speculation about what the new brand pages will look like, the social network’s changes already have several benefits for marketers.
As you are browsing the new ‘timeline’ profile, ads are now between the rich content of the profile, and the activity of the ticker and chat window. Consequently, as a user’s eyes move back and forth between the timeline content and the right rail ticker/chat, their eyes continually pass over the ad.
Knowing this was valuable real estate, when you resize the width of window, the right rail (content valuable to the user) is the first to disappear, while the ad unit (content valuable to the marketer) stays intact no matter how small you shrink the window.
Additionally, Facebook finally realized that users do not spend the majority of their time at the top of a page. Until now, the position of ad units was locked to the top of the page, meaning they disappeared as the user scrolled down. With the new layout, the ad units are locked to the bottom, as you can see in the new CSS:
While the placement of the ad unit is more than fortunate for marketers, the new way users interact with content is even more intriguing. First, we’ll compare two music services, SoundCloud and Spotify.
Spotify had the good fortune of a $30 million dollar investment from Sean Parker and the rolodex that comes along with it. As a launch partner for Facebook’s new layout, Spotify had the benefit of implementing the new Open Graph features first.
Previously, incentivizing a user to allow permissions for a Facebook app was considered marketing gold. While access to email addresses and contact info were helpful for remarketing, the ability to post to a user’s wall was the grail. Marketers were given the opportunity to speak on a user’s behalf to all their friends, which provided mass reach.
SoundCloud gets all the information they required under the previous Open Graph structure: Name, contact info, publishing rights, etc.
However, as the news feed has become saturated, simply posting on a user’s behalf is increasingly no longer enough to break through the noise.
As you can see below, the default setting for Spotify grants it permission to publish to my timeline:
Simply announcing to a user’s friends that they started using your product was a very singular broadcast. Hopefully a handful of their friends saw the post before it sank to the bottom of their news feed, but if not, there were no repeat opportunities to post on the user’s behalf unless they specifically took action to do so (sharing a playlist, etc.). With the new timeline/ticker permission, brands can now publish every time you have any interaction with their app.
What results is that the apps with the most usage receive the most broadcast. Previously, unless users liked, commented on, or shared the app, the level of usage of an app did not determine its reach. By being diligent in specifying the new action verbs, brand marketers have the opportunity to associate their brand with specific day-to-day actions.
via Facebook
Your friends now know what music you listen to because of Spotify, Rdio, and iHeartRadio. They can also see the movies/TV shows you watch with Hulu, and the articles you read on the Washington Post and Yahoo.
Any action that a user takes online can be translated into a publishable action on Facebook that in turn builds and defines a person’s profile. As commerce increasingly moves online, marketers now have substantially increased reach via a person’s day-to-day actions, after previously being limited to users needing to specifically interact with the brand’s page or app in order for it to publish on their behalf.
While these day-to-day actions comprise the minute actions that populate the real-time feed of the ticker, they also contribute to the person’s profile. The brand now has the opportunity to be a part of the user’s life as their friends scroll through their new timeline profile. Interaction and engagement with brands will contribute to building the profile just as the user’s actions do. This opportunity to be represented as a part of a person’s life is obviously enormously valuable to marketers from an advocacy standpoint.
With the new placement of ads and the added actions of the ticker and timeline, Facebook has provided extremely valuable awareness tools, and with the overhaul of the Open Graph to be verb-centric, the opportunities for advocacy are through the roof. Now its up to the marketers to drive the engagement…
