Facebook has drastically changed in the past year, and marketing
on it has changed as well. The image-heavy Facebook timeline has made many
changes for how businesses market their products and services through the
social media site. There is an
impressive amount of pressure on Facebook to be advertising friendly, and a lot
of this comes from the fact that with its 133 million users, it can potentially
have a bigger audience than the Super Bowl.
The first marketing trend the new Facebook has is the
ability to post more and larger photos. Consumers are getting used to a more
image filled web, so the new Facebook design features much bigger pictures than
before. An analytics firm that measures brand performance, Simply Measured,
confirmed a 65% jump for photos and videos combined that companies posted on
their Facebook timelines. Sprinkles Cupcakes is a strong believer in the
effectiveness of posting photos and videos to their Facebook page, especially with
a call to action, seeing the number of likes and comments triple when one
exists.
The second trend Facebook timeline has is tapping real-time
data. Businesses now have the ability to immediately see the success of their
campaign, while typically you have to measure the results at some point in
order to see if the ads are working or not. This past April 17th on
Tax Day, TurboTax saw their Facebook post on “Most Common Tax Questions” doing
well on Facebook’s “People Talking About This” page, so in turn they advertised
on Facebook to increase the reach of the post.
The third trend is to use your Timeline cover photo for
marketing. With the cover photo being a giant picture at the top of the company’s
Facebook page, brans are realizing this photo can be a banner ad. The huge
image provides instant exposure to all of the brands Facebook fans. Other
brands are using the cover photo as an interactive photo for their fans. With different
call to actions, such as posting a question on the image, fans can now interact
with the cover photo.
The fourth trend the Facebook timeline creates for marketing
is the gamification of posts. Coca-cola is a very well-known brand on Facebook.
Coca-cola has been posting URL riddles
to its millions of fans. Along with them, JetBlue has also been posting more
interesting and interactive posts such as “Fill in the Blank” status updates.
JetBlue received 182% more comments per most than other typical brands with
their post gamification method.
The fifth and final trend on the new Facebook timeline is
creatively saying ‘Thank You’. By coming up with creative ways to thank your
fans, you can single out and give your fans praise while entertaining the rest
of the fans, who normally would have been uninterested in the post. Kraft Mac
& Cheese did this by posting a 7-minute video thanking 4,800 fans who had “liked”
a post of theirs. The video consisted of a song which included each of their
individual names. The 4,800 fans were individually thanked, and the rest of the
fans were still entertained in the process.
Facebook Exchange, the bidding feature, is projected to be
launched in a few weeks. Facebook is currently working with eight different
firms, such as Turn, TellApart, MediaMath, DataXu, AdRoll, Triggit, and The
Trade Desk, to create this feature. Facebook has just begun to include cookies
to track users by their browsers. Third parties will match information from
other sites with those cookies. If a user searches for “truck,” and then goes
onto Facebook, advertisers in the auto industry will be able to show that user
ads on Facebook for trucks. 