Facebook is making user engagement and content discovery much more useful for users and product marketers alike.
Content Sharing Finally Gets Some Context
Until now, Facebook only supported the ability to “Like” a variety of content and web pages. However, the new Open Graph supports many more actions or verbs, which means users can now convey a richer set of actions, intentions and context back to their friends and subscribers. Your users can share that they read a news story, baked a cake, listened to a song, downloaded an iPhone app, or bought your product. Of course they can still like pages as well.
For retailers, this means instead of just “Liking” a product page, you can create any verb association. You probably will want netizens to “Want,” “Need,” “Own,” and/or “Give” your products, but creative retailers will find other things customers would like to do with their products, like “Upgrade to,” their new software, “Rock” their new headphones, and “Sport” their latest sunglasses. Expect “Love” to get used for just about everything.
Improved Discovery
The new Facebook profile page now contains three distinct elements in order to create an easier way for users to consume data.
- The Timeline allowing a user to customize and share life stages and milestones with their friends and family
- The Ticker displaying real-time actions from friends such as “Tony Ahn just became friends with John Smith”
- The familiar News Feed itself containing status updates and posts from a user’s social graph.
So, rather than display every action taken by a user’s friends, family and colleagues in a single timeline, these activity updates are now broken into three areas of the profile page, which allows for easier discovery and consumption.