Facebook’s Major Makeover – Why Businesses can’t ignore it

If you are a business owner, be it a large multinational, a small business or a cottage industry chances are you have some kind of Facebook presence.  You may have noticed a flurry of activity and changes in your Facebook page and were left wondering what it’s all about. Well it’s not over yet! At the recently concluded F8 conference in San Francisco, Mark Zuckerberg, introduced some significant changes that may well affect the way we do business – AGAIN!  Watch the Video

So let’s take a brief look at these new changes and why you can’t ignore it.

1. The 800 pound gorilla in the room – The Facebook Timeline
   Everyone is talking about it. You’ve probably heard or read about it. Websites and blogs worldwide are already debating how this feature will change the look of major brand pages and some have gone so far as to create mock-up pages for major brands. So what is Facebook Timeline?  Facebook Timeline is essentially your new profile/fan page. It is an anthology of your life.  This new feature will test all marketers’ storytelling skills, since your brand pages will now tell the story of your brand. Although not available to the general public yet, developers are already making use of it. While scrolling through a Facebook page timeline you can look at posts, photos and other events from the past, which can be adjusted in size and hidden from view based on privacy settings. The entire biography of your brand will soon be digital and social.
   
2. The Biggest Loser – The ‘Like’ Button
   In the the not too distant future, any Facebook user can comment on a business or brand page- without having to Like it first.  This feature has the potential to open up the conversation to millions of Facebook users. With the launch of Facebook Gestures, you don’t just have to like it you can any [verb] it.  Since any verb can now be turned into a Facebook gesture.
3. Read Notifications for site visits
   A new social activity plugin made available through open graph, once installed in your website and activated by a user, will send a notification to the users Facebook wall. The potential for this feature to drive traffic to your website is huge. Suddenly reaching the rest of the world doesn’t seem to be such a daunting task.
4. Character Limit on Status Updates
   The upper limit on character for status updates has been increased from 420 to 5000.  This now means you can share more content about your business or brand.
5. Measurement Metrics per Post
   In addition to administrators being able to view per post activity; you can also now track your aggregate performance and export the Insights report.
6. A Music Platform
   With the launch of its music dashboard, Facebook has ensured that users can now listen to what their friends are listening to and view top albums and songs. What this means for you is that more users are spending more time on Facebook, therefore increasing the overall possibility of boosting your site traffic.

As usual, Facebook’s changes have met with a huge backlash of comments and complaints, but on the whole everyone agrees with these new changes, Facebook is trying to ensure that you never leave it. The popular music, the most watched movies, the TV shows, the top stories all are available through Facebook friend feeds and activity lists. Facebook is becoming the dominant source for all popular data and information available on the internet.

Advantages for Business

• The biggest advantage that businesses now have with Facebook timeline is, you now have a digital biography of your potential target market. You will now know where they drink their coffee, what music they are listening to right now, who their top friends are and what are they sharing. This is all the information marketers need to design a campaign that reaches out to and interacts with your customers.
• The new Facebook pages are more visual, which helps you to design your page in such a way that it tells your story in the most visually appealing manner possible.
• The new activity sharing will enable businesses to use Facebook Ads in interesting ways based on the new behavioral data that Facebook will now be archiving.
• It does not matter how many Likes you have. Facebook has taken customer engagement to a whole new level. Because customers can now opt-in or out. They no longer need to be “liking” your page to comment on it. The richer your content experiences the more chances you have of building brand loyalty.

In the words of Mark Zuckerberg, the changes to Facebook, will enable a “frictionless experience,” real-time serendipity, and finding patterns in what you and your friends do. In commemoration of Facebook’s Timeline feature, let’s take a look at the social media platform’s development timeline.

In conclusion, every major overhaul that Facebook has carried out has met some amount of criticism, however good or bad we can’t stop talking about it. Love it or Hate it, you cannot afford to ignore the new changes that Facebook has made. If you are an interactive marketer, chances are you will love the challenge that Facebook has thrown at you and if you are a business that is not currently engaged with Facebook then this is now your opportunity to move into social media marketing for your business.

If you would like to leave a comment, ask a question or arrange a one-to-one consultation contact me on logan@logannathan.com or via only of my social media channels using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus.

About Logan

Social Media Business Consultant | Internet (Web) Marketing Strategist Speaker | Trainer

Based in Sydney, Australia, Logan has been an avid & passionate social media user since the advent of Facebook. Logan runs his own workshops on the social media secrets in Australia. He has also written a number of eBooks on the same subjects (Social Media Secrets for your Business, Twitter Secrets for Your Business and Social Media Startup Guide for Business), all of which are now published and available online. Logan is also a passionate speaker on the subject of using ‘Internet and Social Media for Business’ and spoken at number of Business conferences in Australia and overseas.

I will be discussing Facebook’s changes in detail at my upcoming workshops in October and November in Sydney, Melbourne and overseas. For booking, refer http://www.socialmediaforbusiness.com.au/register-for-social-media-training/index.php