Facebook has made significant changes to how brands can engage with customers. The "Like" button is less important, and brands must provide compelling content to be part of meaningful customer conversations. Those with relevant content can better engage customers through new tools like user timelines and Facebook apps. Marketers face new challenges in utilizing the updated Facebook features to strengthen interactions with fans and drive viral sharing of content. Leveraging customer data from social media interactions will be key to succeeding in this new environment.

1. customer centria
The Customer Engagement & Experience Company
Marketers’ face-off with
the new Facebook
Date: 03/10/2011
www.customercentria.com

2. Most marketers were trying to learn and leverage on the 5th largest economy in the world – Facebook, only to
realise that the rules of engagement recently changed and how fast!
So, What does Facebook’s bold and radical list of changes spell for marketers and corporates?
Goodbye to all the “digital agencies” who built their business on buying facebook fans. Its no longer
How much- its only about HOW?
The Like button has been marginalised, and has a much smaller role to play. Brands, will thus start feeling the
pressure to come up with some really compelling content and integrate it further into the right channels to truly
become part of meaningful conversations or privy to the consumers inner circle.
Facebook has created the ultimate divide – The haves and the have-nots. The brands that do have relevant,
meaningful and ‘valuable content’, just don’t get a leg into the consumers private space.
New Toys for the consumers.
For the users, Facebook now has a completely different set of to tools to play with and explore. The most talked
about being the Timeline that track your life story through your updates. The jury is still out on this one. But for a
marketer, it provides an extremely rich peek into a consumer’s journey, and just what makes him tick.
In this context, engagement can be taken to a completely new level, because of the emergence of Facebook Apps as
a key engagement tool. The metrics of the game are about to change forever – the quality of the environment, the
depth of the interaction, and the impact of the relationship are only going to get better. The fact is, that social
media is no longer for the weak hearted and the fence sitters.
Real-time Serendipity!
The overall experience of being an integrated whole is what defines the new Facebook. Now users can listen to
music together through Spotify and watch a video together through Netflix and Hulu. They can also make tea or go
for a jog at the same time through the multiple apps experience. Their Facebook friends get real-time
notifications and you have a timeline telling your story in sequence. Facebook calls it real time serendipity, and
rightly so.
Just to decode the new Facebook phenomenon for marketers: the few major changes on your Facebook page:
The News Feed Ticker: All of the ‘noisy stuff’ on Facebook now gets relegated to the ticker. So only brands that are
truly strategic about what they publish will really make it to the wall. Plain old status updates are just not going to
cut ice any more
www.customercentria.com

3. Open Graphs: The intent is to bring together social actions from all across the web and aggregate them on
facebook, a social remote of sorts which allow users to watch TV shows, movies and listen to music without getting
out of Facebook. Netflix, Spotify and Hulu, just got hotter than they already were, and are ripe for partnering with
big brands to provide innovative solutions
The Subscribe Button: ‘Like’ probably, the most abused term on facebook, because most consumers hated to
“like” a brand, just to consume the content. And now a consumer can “subscribe” or follow people or brands that is
not ‘friends’ with.
Timeline: The new layout has somewhat opened up new potential for tracking a consumer’s interests and
engagement with brands over their lifetime.”
‘Consumer is King’ gets new meaning in the case of the “New” facebook, and C2C is a whole new dimension.
Brands can no longer be complacent, and rest on their large fan bases. Which makes the job of online marketing
managers more challenging and creative, as tempting as it will be to just want a consumer to ‘like’ your page, and
assume thereafter that he is ‘engaged’.
How users can connect with brands
With developers being able to turn any verb into a button, the opportunity for marketers just got endless, and
engagement much deeper. Facebook’s Social Graph will enable marketers to be able to effectively track
consumers and their brand usage.
Some positives stand out in the new Facebook design
1 Stronger and Better Interaction with Fans
As the Wall tab becomes the focus, Pages will have a much more active and dynamic feel
2 Viral-friendly Setup
Any content posted on the new Wall will also appear in the news feed of fans more often
3 Multiple Ways to Communicate
The Status Update will serve as an important way to share short, brief and interesting blurbs with Fans. Brands
using Twitter will be able to sync their accounts so selected Tweets will reach the Facebook wall automatically
4 Specific and Customised Landing Page for Non-Fans
The Wall tab is the entry point for Fans, and for non-fans, the page admins can choose which tab to be used as the
landing page. So if a page has some content to be promoted, it can be made the landing page for non-fans to
increase the Likes.
www.customercentria.com

4. Combating the Challenges
So the new design makes the pages more dynamic and viral-friendly, and here’s how the marketers can make the
most of the challenges:
Update the content more frequently and consistently; ensure the Wall tab stays fresh and novel.
Brands will have to establish specific guidelines on what content can be posted here on a more consistent basis.
Most importantly, the brand’s page admins will have to think deep, and determine what type of content i.e. text,
photos, audio, videos, links the fans are most likely to share
Fan-to-brand interaction will gain prominence over static brand content, so it becomes important for brands
to practice their control intelligently
Watch out for the static brand content like About Us and Contact info on your page, as there will be a need to
adhere to the standard template.
What Next?
The rules of engagement have changed – we need to surrender all that is familiar, reshuffle, relook and regroup –
truly dig deep, to be able to get the ‘new engagement mantra’ right.
Social CRM just became more meaningful.
Customer Centria’s Data to Delight promise, becomes more significant in the new emerging Social Web. And
marketers need to wake up and smell the coffee.
Agencies with the ability to leverage the data thrown up by the various new facets of facebook, and use it as creative
leverage to build in a high degree of relevance and interactivity into campaigns, targeting and engaging users, this
provides firms with unprecedented opportunities to take Social CRM to the next level.
It is going to be interesting to wait and watch how marketers embrace the next generation of social media
marketing, where transaction data, can be mapped to social behaviour, giving marketers an arsenal, which will
guarantee them winning the war.
www.customercentria.com