Yesterday’s Developer Roadmap Event at Facebook was excellent; thanks again to the Facebook Executive and Platform teams for hosting us. The web is buzzing today with summaries and commentary on the technical plans they outlined, the most succinct of which can be found here.
But I want to take a step back and talk about some of the strategic implications for our Clients and Agency partners who work with us to create effective Social Marketing Solutions using Facebook, because I think they are very, very exciting.
#1: Enabling more meaningful Brand – Customer interaction
The Facebook stream has become a central part of the experience and area of significant innovation—especially with the new Stream Publisher API—but it has recently been largely overrun by game posts and notifications that had nowhere else to go. This meant that user and brand-generated posts were getting lost in the noise, and users were getting overwhelmed.
With Facebook moving games and their notifications to their own section and consolidating the communication channels, the stream will be a lot cleaner. And from a marketer’s perspective, when users choose to share something about a brand they have connected with, it will be much more direct and actionable.
#2: Better integration of Social & Online Marketing Programs
A key challenge in executing and measuring social marketing programs has been the integration of Facebook’s data & communication with other online programs.
Facebook’s plans to 1) allow access to user’s email addresses and 2) provide an API to their analytics tools will go a long way toward bridging that gap. Many of our clients are looking to bring promotional and direct marketing initiatives to Facebook, and these two changes are critical to paving the way for those programs.
#3: Extending the reach and capabilities of Fan Pages
Fan Pages and Custom Tabs have created a new and powerful type of Social “real estate”—something we often help clients leverage for their content, campaigns and promotions. And while off-Facebook extensions like the FB Fan Box and FB Connect Comments have made for good toes-in-the-water, the newly announced OpenGraph API promises to be much bigger than that.
A key component of effective Social Marketing using Fan Pages is “activation”—giving fans meaningful ways to engage with and evangelize the brands they care about. With the OpenGraph API on the horizon, the potential and reach for activation and engagement may well expand to any online (or mobile) property. This puts Facebook Fan Pages at the center of very big engagement hub.
It’s time to start thinking (even) bigger…
For marketers (and for us) the take-away here is that the social marketing potential that Facebook offers, as both a destination and a platform, is about to expand significantly. And brands who are quick to put these tools to work will create new advantages for themselves and their customers. Certainly an exciting time to be at the forefront of social marketing.
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