Facebook held their first ever Facebook Marketing Conference in New York City yesterday and made some big announcements geared towards business/brand page owners.
As of March 30th, 2012, all Facebook business pages will be converted to the new timeline format. Business page admins have the opportunity to play around with the new features in a “preview” mode with the ability to publish their page’s changes into the new timeline format prior to the March 30th date.
No More Custom Applications as Default Landing Page Tab
One of the biggest announcements was that business pages can no longer feature one of their custom applications as their default landing page. TechCruch did a nice write up on how this will affect marketers moving forward. It will be interesting to see how marketers adapt to this change which I think will have a larger impact on smaller businesses with big brands leveraging Facebook’s new features.
Some of the New Features for Business Pages
Reach Generator: this new feature will put your content in front of a larger audience and is based on a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) model. Facebook gave a couple of examples of reach generator’s potential with one them being Ben and Jerry’s who reached 98% of their fans through the new feature.
Offers: this feature allows business page admins to create stories with offers in them which can be redeemed by anyone that comes across the story, fan or not. These are free for business page owners to create and share.
Premium on Facebook: in my opinion, this is a feature that you will see larger brands capitalizing on more so than small businesses. Premium on Facebook will allow page owners to distribute their content to a far larger audience via right hand side ads and advertisements that displays directly in a fan’s newsfeed. These ads have the potential to be displayed to desktop users, mobile users with the additional option to show ads to users that are logging out of Facebook.
Other features include a new admin area design and the ability for fans to initiate private messages with brands.
Below is a screenshot of Coca-Cola’s Facebook page which is converted to the new timeline format:
Content Marketing + Social Media STILL = Success
New features and news aside, one thing remains the same – content marketing + social media = success. Earlier this year, one of my predictions/tips to marketers was the idea that a strong content marketing campaign along with the effective use of social media would bring success in 2012 and beyond. This statement couldn’t be more true after Facebook’s announcements yesterday. If social media marketers want to see success moving forward, they will be required to develop creative content and utilize social media as a means of spreading their messages and stories. How will you adapt?
Turn Your Community Into Brand Advocates
To sum it all up, Facebook’s changes shouldn’t have too drastic of an effect on social media marketers. Minus a few new features and a new layout, your end goal should still be to build a community and deliver relevant content to your audience. Take advantage of Facebook’s new features as a way of reaching a larger audience and further turning your audience into brand advocates.
What do you think of Facebook’s new features?
