Tag Archives: facebook
Apps Bring Your Timeline to Life
Facebook announced 60 new apps for Timelines this week, and with further extension of the Open Graph, there will be plenty more on the way. Essentially, that means developers will have the opportunity to create the apps they desire and add them to their timelines. With this opportunity, the possibilities are endless. The whole idea of adding apps to Timelines really amplifies the “social factor” of the initial idea.
Parents help kids lie to get on Facebook, study finds
Many people feel that rules are meant to be broken. That being said, oftentimes they are created for safety and protection. For example, Facebook has a very well advertised rule that children under the age of 13 may not join the site. But recently, there has been a swarm of children under the age of 13 active in the Facebook community. Many of these children are likely sneaking onto the site without their parent’s knowledge, but a new study has found that many parents of children under 13 are helping them get their very own Facebook accounts.
According to the study, “[t[he vast majority (95%) of the parents of 10-year-olds on Facebook were aware when their child signed up for the site, and 78% of those parents helped create the child’s account, according to the study. For 11- and 12-year-olds, the percentages of parental knowledge and involvement were slightly lower.” With the prevalence of cyber bullying and online predators, why is it that these parents are helping their children break the rules?
In this third and final installment, Senior Developer Kevin Malone shares his thoughts on Facebook’s workflow improvements from a tech perspective.
What are they going to break this time? That’s probably the question most Facebook application developers were thinking at the start of the f8 2011 conference. When it comes to Facebook, change can be scary. While users of Facebook get all worked up over interface changes, those of us who build applications on top of the Facebook platform have legitimate concerns. Namely, did the changes break our applications? Unfortunately, it happens more often than anyone cares to think about.
Thankfully, this post isn’t about what Facebook broke. It’s about what they have made better. Facebook has introduced a number of changes that will make the lives of developers a bit easier.
We’ve asked our team to comment on the changes to Facebook announced at the F8 summit from the perspective of different disciplines. In this second installment, our community moderators, Lauren Lindsay, Steve Mannino and Amy Gosalia look at user reactions and community management challenges.
Lauren: Changes in User Behaviour
Facebook’s move to the Timeline is going to make users focus first on altering and updating their own profiles. The yearbook-like format means a lot of work for people who’ve had Facebook since college and are now going to have to downplay years of partying photos. During this transitionary period, we may see a slight drop in brand interactions, as users pull their attention away from the Newsfeed to focus on making sure those old pictures won’t cost them their jobs.
I’m interested to see how users can take advantage of the organization factor of Timelines without many personal photos. Some people just don’t use Facebook as a place to display photos of themselves – how will they keep their timelines interesting? Will book apps and updates have covers attached to them? Can you put in movie clips attached to the movies you’ve seen?
We’ve asked our team to comment on the changes to Facebook announced at the F8 summit last week from the perspective of different disciplines. In this first installment, Leif Fescenmeyer (from our Insight & Planning group) looks at the implications for branded interactions and Scot Wheeler (from Marketing Science) discusses what, if any, changes to expect from Facebook insights.
Leif: Overall, I think the new Facebook interface has a lot going for it and at the same time, may have some hurdles besides the general distaste for change from users.
Brand Implications
It will be interesting to see how the new Newsfeed and realtime content Ticker will impact impressions and engagement on branded content from Pages. Already, we’ve noticed that impressions are no longer published on brand posts. How will “Top Posts” integrate branded content or will it at all? Will brands, in the future, be able to buy “Top Posts?” If branded content is not published as frequently or is secondary to Top Posts, will consumers and fans interact with brands as much as they did before? If so, how will brands prepare for decreased engagement?
News Feed and Ticker
The revamped Newsfeed and Ticker went over like a lead balloon with users, due perhaps to its unceremonious introduction. I’ve heard the Ticker called “a Facebook within a Facebook”–Inception style. It is and it isn’t. Read More
Facebook Unveils New Partnerships
One of the biggest pieces of social media news this week was the keynote speech made by Mark Zuckerberg at f8. Between describing the new profile timeline and announcing their new goal of having 1 billion users by the end of October, they announced a smattering of new partnerships. Among them were The Guardian and Vevo, but the two that garnered the most attention are most definitely Spotify and Netflix. The idea for both partnerships is to allow users to share their music and movies with friends. You can publish the song that you listen to on the way into work, or connect with friends over your favorite parts of your favorite movies. While the Netflix partnership will not first be released in the US, these are both worth while to keep an eye on. These partnerships are not only great advancements for Facebook, but they are a way for Facebook to announce that new and emerging medias are here to stay, so we had all better get onboard.
Rather than just friending one another and stalking your old high school sweetheart, Facebook is encouraging users to share more about their lives, while interacting with different types of media. While this will have massive implications for the 800 million people using the service, it will also have even bigger implications for the brands using it. For the brands that are using social media, it will be more important than ever to realize the impact that other medias. By engaging consumers through services like Spotify and Netflix in congruency with Facebook, brands will have a much more engaging campaign and a much higher chance of snagging the consumers attention.
