Facebook redesign – what it means for brands

What happened? The home page for a user has been completely redesigned, with a focus on news feed content. For those not up to speed on news feed content,  news feeds are messages from your friends and brands that you like to follow. It is akin to your morning newspaper, but represents a fairly active snapshot of the life of a typical Facebook user.

The other major adjustment in our view is the prominent location of the search box. Facebook are clearly en route to embedding search directly into the heart of a user’s Facebook experience.   If you are a brand that is already on Facebook what is your organic Facebook search result? User generated interaction with Facebook apps are also searchable and rank pretty high.

The final part to the overall restructure were substantial changes to Facebook application messaging rules. All good stuff, purely designed to reduce spam from bad apps and improve cut through from good apps.

Conclusion – We like it.  The newsfeed experience is cleaner. Overall navigation is better.

All good stuff if you are a user. However, if you are a brand attempting to engage with your existing fan base or trying to attract new fans, then your ability to do so has gone from being limited, to very restrictive.

The core objective of any brand’s Facebook presence has got to be getting content into a user’s news feed.  In the world of traditional advertising, most marketers solve this problem through some form of media spend  - ie figure out the message and then purchase a package of banner adds /  tv ads, etc. etc.   The only problem with this type of approach is that a brand cannot just purchase access to a user’s news feed. A brand cannot buy their way into a user’s Facebook life.  A brand must win the respect and trust of the user by providing relevant content and engagement.  Simple.

Content generation typically comes from brands communicating through the Facebook fan page, which hopefully generates some form of interaction and comments from your fans. Fan pages are the Holy Grail for any brands on Facebook.   Creative and strategic planning for a brand’s Facebook presence seems to be a alien concept for a lot of people and brands. In order to build a long term relationship with users, a brand needs to plan the content generation for the long term.  What is this content? What applications are needed to power this content? What is the tone, style and frequency of content generation.  How does your traditional spend sync sit alongside your Facebook presence?

We will put pen to paper over the coming weeks to articulate some of our thoughts on medium term Facebook strategic planning, bearing in mind the goal of relevant news feed relationships.

Declan