Unless you’re too busy watching the Facebook stock price on a minute by minute basis, you social marketers may want to know about a few changes and new things you can do with the network. If you think your Page’s appearance, mobile, and chat are of importance, then enter our Vitrue newsroom!
Bulletin 1: You can manage your Page from a mobile device now.
This is a big deal. It was such a fundamental “missing” functionality given how long we’ve all been able to manage our personal Facebook streams on mobile. Sure you could manage your Page through your phone’s web browser, but who wants to do that on the Planet of the Apps world we now live in? Now there’s a Facebook app…but only for iPhone. You can make posts, comment, respond, put up photos, etc. We at Vitrue have a pretty good understanding of the Community Manager lifestyle, and anything that makes brand Page management via mobile possible and easy is a step in the proverbial right direction.
Bulletin 2: You can conduct chats with up to 12 people on Facebook now.It’s through ooVoo. Google Hangouts lets users video chat in groups of 10, so maybe the competitive landscape in that functionality is going to be about ongoing one-upsmanship. You can send friends the link to start the session even if they don’t have the ooVoo app. The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project study tells us almost 40% of all teenage Internet users video chat. So guess what. That means as they grow up (sorry, I should say grow up more), they’re going to be highly accustomed to communicating that way. Video chats are golden for brands when it comes to customer service, product demos, webinars, how-to, etc. It’s also a sweet way to exhibit a human face to your brand so customers feel like they have a real advocate and contact.
Bulletin 3: The look of Facebook Timeline is changing…already.Facebook is trying out a different look for the top of Timelines. Nothing drastic, but it is probably something you’ll have to be aware of and deal with when designing your cover photo. Currently, nothing covers up or gets in the way of your cover photo, other than your profile picture. The new style takes the “about you” info below your profile picture and moves it to the right of the profile picture, over the cover photo. Then, the boxes for friends, photos, events, etc. will look more like, well, tabs as opposed to the images they are now. Added to these elements is a “summary” tab that will probably showcase certain things on your Timeline. We could go into all kinds of deep speculation about why Facebook is going to this new look. The main point seems to be a desire to condense the top portion so that the pinned post (if any) doesn’t land quite so below the fold. No word on when or if these changes will be applied to brand Pages, but there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to put my ear back to the ground.
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