Facebook: What was announced at F8 and what does it mean?

Last week saw the arrival of the F8 conference. Cue many disgruntled Facebook users complaining over Facebook layout changes and setting up pages to restore the platform back to its familiar old look. How will they react when they find out these changes are just the beginning? After a long list of imminent changes being announced it is not only the personal user that may struggle to keep up with the changes, but also business that have become comfortable with using pages and done so successfully. It is essential that the changes are understood so here’s our overview of them and what they mean for marketing on Facebook.
 
Gestures: Facebook seem to have discovered the Thesaurus and as such are now enabling all posts, pages and links to not just be liked but ‘loved’, ‘watched’, ‘rented’ or ‘listened’; giving developers the ability to use any verb they likes as a call to action button. This not only applies to Pages but also to apps, it will certainly be interesting to see what developers cook up to take advantage of this new feature.
 
Postings: It will no longer be necessary for a user to ‘Like’ your page before being able to add content to your wall. Any business with an actively used Twitter account shouldn’t find this a problem though, as surely it’s no different to a mention? There are two sides to this coin though; not having a ‘like’ button will open pages up to an increased amount of spam, so beady eyes will have to be kept on all content posted (although this should be done anyway), but on the other hand it does make pages much more accessible.
 
Tick, Tock: A big welcome to the News Feed Ticker and a rapturous farewell to yet another Mall World Photo showing someone’s desperate effort to become the next Stella McCartney through Facebook. The Ticker hides all the less active posts and instead shows in our News Feed the most interacted with posts, links, videos and photos. This will hopefully encourage businesses to concentrate more on creating valuable content for their audiences to interact with and thus keep their pages’ content in the prominent position of the News Feed.
 
Partnerships: By collaborating with the likes of Spotify it will now be possible for users to better see what their friends are watching, listening to and reading. It will now be possible to watch your Mum’s favourite soap or listen that song your friend keeps humming without ever having to leave the comfort of Facebook.
 
Advertising: With deeper integration of the aforementioned Gestures advertisers will now have the capability to further target users listening to certain bands, shopping at particular shops or reading certain articles and books. Well designed campaigns will be vital to those wishing to use this new information to their advantage, but it will be possible.
 
Without doubt these changes will have a large impact on both personal and business users and with the personal profile changes coming (it would be very surprising if these were not also applied to pages as well) there will be more to come from the social media superpower. Companies wishing to get ahead in the world of Facebook are going to have to re-direct their focus from collecting fans and, instead, get creative and understand the intricacies of the changes to ensure they are building thriving online communities that continue to attract and engage with users. Those that don’t will certainly feel the impact.