Overview

& Implications of Facebook Announcements @ fMC

SUMMARY OF NEW FEATURES Facebook has updated its Brand Page with Timeline, introduced a robust administrator dashboard, and unveiled its new premium ad distribution system: Reach Generator. Timeline for Brand Pages changes the way consumers interact with brands on Pages. Brands have greater control over their identity and more opportunities for creative expression. Since most of consumer engagement takes place in the Newsfeed, these changes do not represent a massive shift in brand/consumer interactions on Facebook overall. All Brand Pages will be updated with Timeline on March 30th, but brands can make the jump sooner if they wish. A robust community management dashboard now appears at the top of Brand Page administrators. It centralizes and streamlines Facebooks community management capabilities, allowing Page admins to monitor and respond to all consumer activity in a single place. The Dashboard is also the new home of the Insights page analytics display. The Reach Generator ad distribution system is designed to increase the exposure of your brands posts in your fans timelines. Whereas before, less than 15% of your fans saw one of your posts, you can now use Facebooks Reach Generator to guarantee at least 75% of your followers will see a given post. HOW TIMELINE CHANGES ENGAGEMENT ON BRAND PAGES Timeline Cover Photo: This large visual asset offers brands a great creative canvas at the very top of its Page. While this offers many opportunities to visually engage consumers and showcase compelling content, it comes with some very specific rules: o Cannot include price or purchase info, contact info, references to Facebook features or actions (such as Like our page), or calls to action. o Must be more of a brand identifier and work to tell the brands story. Landing Tabs and Like-Gating Are Gone: Many Brand Pages automaticaly direct first-time visitors to a Welcome/Overview tab. This will be no more with Timeline. Apps have taken the place of tabs. Four large, customizable App icons live beneath the Cover Photo. o The first icon, Photos, will always occupy the first spot in the row of App icons, but the remaining three spots can be hand-selected and customized by the brand. o Top priority apps should be given one of the three slots. A dropdown menu contains room for up to twelve apps, though these are hidden until a user clicks on the menu. o Apps can be nearly 50% wider than previous tabs, offering new creative possibilities. o Like-Gating, for all intents and purposes, has changed in a way that makes it almost unusable for brands. Facebook has not said whether this is a purposeful change or simply a temporary issues cropping up during the transition to Timeline. Pinned Posts: Brands can anchor or pin their most important story at the top of the page for up to 7 days. Pinned Posts provide an opportunity for brands to feature specific call outs or promotions that they want their fans to keep top of mind for an extended period of time. o Pinned posts are a natural place to feature a primary call-to-action during promotional periods to drive to a specific App or external site. o Pinned posts cannot be starred (see next bullet). Starred Posts are the new Full Page Spread: When a brand has an important piece of content to share like images of a new product, a video, or other rich content, the containing

 post can be Starred. Starring a post makes it span the entire width of the Timeline, instead of just appearing on the right or left side of the Timeline. o Images and videos will have a much more impactful presence on the Page, and will offer brands greater creative opportunities to create visually stunning and differentiated experiences on their Page. o Starred posts cannot be pinned. Private Messaging: By default, fans can now privately message brands just as they do with their friends. Brands have the option to turn this feature off if they wish to keep all dialogue in a public setting. o Has the potential to greatly reduce the amount of support/service related issues publicly addressed on a brand page. Consumers may be more likely to privately contact a brand about an issue, or, community managers can publicly direct a concerned consumer to reach out privately via this feature to avoid protracted support discussions in a public setting. o If brands choose to use this feature, they should provide fans with clear guidelines of when to message the brand, i.e., customer support or for a specific promotion. o Brands and their agencies should also have a Facebook specific customer support response mechanism in place A New Type of Brand Post Milestones: Brands can identify key moments on their Timelines such as product launches, store openings, or add milestones from the past such as the founding of the company. o Brands with strong backstories and historical equity should document key moments with big status updates or photos that can include a date (i.e. our product in 1996). o Moving forward, all product launches, fan growth, and campaigns can be highlighted with this feature. Another New Type of Brand Post Offers: The introduction of the Offers post format and Sponsored Story allows brands to organically feature and track offers/promotions as part of their Facebook experience. o Fans who click on an offer are contacted by the brand via email to receive the offer. o This should not be seen as a gateway for brands to go coupon-happy on Facebook, but rather to leverage this as a means to strategically reward fans with special offers/deals and promotions. Consumer Posts Are Relegated to a Sandbox in the Timeline: Previously, brand posts and consumer posts mixed together on the Wall of a brand page in chronological order; neither received priority over the other. Now, unless a user manually changes their viewing preferences, all consumer-created posts to a Brands timeline are relegated to a consumer sandbox similar to a thread of comments on a photo. o Brand Page managers can hand pick specific consumer posts that can be added to the timeline to increase visibility. o Curation of consumer posts on Timeline can be used by brands as a very simple fan recognition tactic. Brands in the Context of Friends: Timeline puts a brands page in the context of your social network first and foremost. When a consumer visits your Brand Page, the Timeline content that appears at the top right is a visual summary of their friends who are connected to the brand (37 of your friends Like [brand name]). Below that is the most recent Timeline post or mention about the brand made by a friend of the consumer. This allows for a much more customized, relevant user experience.

 NEW ADVERTISING PRODUCTS Reach Generator: The new Reach Generator allows brands to pay to maximize the reach of their fan base by placing their posts in ad units. Typically, brands only reach approx. 16% of their fans through their page posts. With Reach Generator, brands in beta have reached over 75% of their fan base over a one-month period. With Reach Generator, all Premium Ad units purchased through Facebook will now be Brand Page posts. This style of ad unit has tested significantly higher in click-throughs than Facebooks previous style of Premium ad units. Placing the posts in ad units drives more engagement with the posts and therefore more amplified reach to fans and friends of fans. Brands must strategically craft the posts they leverage for Reach Generator, ensuring only the most engaging posts are used, i.e. short, compelling copy with rich imagery/video. THE NEW PAGE ADMIN DASHBOARD After years of leaving Brand Page admins with few tools to manage the demands and complexities of real-time community management, Facebook has finally introduced a robust dashboard for monitoring, responding, and maintaining all consumer engagement on a Page. Key features include: Inbox for direct messages. Real-time queue of all consumer comments/posts on your page. Ability to hide/edit/delete and re-order brand posts. Detailed page analytics Insights display built-in to dashboard. Ability to approve consumer Posts before publishing to the Sandbox or Timeline. OVERALL CONSIDERATIONS All brands will be automatically converted to the timeline layout by March 30th. As of today, brands can immediately opt-in for the new features. Before converting to Timeline, brands can preview the new layout on the page to see how it impacts their current content and adjust accordingly before going public with the changes. Facebook is striving to put brands, branded content, and ads in the context of a consumers friends as much as possible in 2012. It is widely known that brand posts containing images and video receive the highest levels of engagement on average, and now with Timeline, theres more pressure than ever on brands to integrate rich content into their editorial calendar both to drive engagement in consumers newsfeeds, but also to create a dynamic brand presence on the Page. Brands should strategize which stories to Pin or Star as these posts will draw higher levels of engagement compared to typical posts with similar content. New features such as Offers and Reach Generator show Facebook is emphasizing increasing reach to existing fans rather than acquiring new fans into the community. Despite all of these changes, the majority of engagement still occurs in consumers Newsfeeds. Most fans of brands do not visit the Page itself without a clear call-to-action to do so, so the emphasis is still on crafting compelling brand posts, more than creating a really slick brand Page. Brands will also have to be much more strategic in communicating their value proposition for their Page now that there is no longer a default landing Tab. Fans and non-fans will be directed to the same place so the Cover Photo and Pinned Post must cater to both audiences: Clearly communicate the value of the page for first-timers while not alienating existing fans who already know what the page is for and want a deeper experience.

 CONSIDERATIONS RE: ANALYTICS Brand Timelines Spotlights Consumers Friends Impressions/Perceptions of the Brand based on online mentions/activity: o Brands might imagine a fan seeing other friends activity with their page will be beneficial, but only if their friends engagements are positive. Fans now have easy access to their peers activity and will be influenced more by them positively or negatively. This can be good or bad, but the end result is more pressure on the brands to drive positive brand experiences. 7-Day Pinned Posts and Highlights view make it more difficult to understand organic engagements and the true success of themes for brand posts. o Prior to Timeline, consumers only saw the most recent posts and important messages would become lost in the stream as the brand posted new content. Now, if a brand recognizes that a post is performing particularly well, then they can pin this for 7 days to increase the engagements it receives. o The organic success of a post will be lost with this new feature. If a post was pinned or highlighted by the brand, then one would anticipate the engagement being higher than an ordinary post on the timeline. Now analyzing the likes, shares, and comments to various branded posts will no longer deliver meaningful insights for data optimization. o If Facebook does not segment out the highlighted and pinned posts in Facebook insights, then analytics will have to examine the success of a post within each category to truly understand the success of a post, i.e. pinned post to a previously pinned post or a highlighted post to another highlighted post. Facebook recommends hiding or deleting stories that arent as engaging. o For Facebook, a large part of analytics is accessing consumer engagements with the brands, and if some brands choose to hide their lower engagement posts while other brands choose to leave everything visible regardless of post success, then comparing brand engagement rates are no longer apples to apples. o While hiding and deleting posts existed with the old pages as well (and are not recommended as best practice), with the new visual display, brands might choose to hide posts more than before to enhance their brand story. o Since analytics relied on evaluating ordinary posts to develop engagement rates (like rate, share rate, comment rate), these new changes that glorify only some posts will have to be taken into consideration. Metrics for rates can no longer be uniform, but broken into the three new categories - highlight share rate, pinned share rate, and post share rate. o If all brands choose to highlight their most engaging post (and not a product launch), then the future of analytics engagement rates might best be accessed by only focusing on the likes/comments/shares of a highlighted post. Facebook Insights data is now real-time o We no longer have to wait a few days before kicking off weekly/monthly analyses. Facebook Premium Ads: Brands will now have the opportunity to promote their own content through sponsored stories. o Facebook is moving away from paid ads getting traditional likes and making content be king for brands. The new paid model encourages engagements directly with a specific post rather than first being driven to like a brand page and then potentially engaging with the content.

 o This brings up the same issue as highlighted and pinned posts, a sponsored post can no longer be compared apples to apples to an ordinary brand post. The engagements for these sponsored posts will exceed the engagements of a post only on the brand timeline. Were exploring whether or not the post on the brand timeline will indicate that it was sponsored as it does when it appears in consumers Newsfeeds. If it doesnt, this will taint organic posts if we dont know which branded posts were actually sponsored and taint the virality metric in the Insights data.

Focus on Quality Content for Gaining new fans o Between the elimination of Like-Gating (more details below) and its focus on Sponsored Stories for ads, Facebook is forcing brands to develop rich content that will encourage potential fans to like your page. Curiosity in an app will no longer be the driver so if the content isnt compelling apps will likely see a decrease in their fans or potential fans liking.

CONSIDERATIONS RE: COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT The story of fMCs updates from a community management perspective is the need for strong page publishing content. The announcements of Timeline and the revised ad platform is just yet another reiteration from Facebook that Content is King, specifically the content we publish through conversation. Community managers will need to be savvier. With the amplification tools at our disposable each post is no longer created equal. o Community managers will need to understand what posts are performing best while factoring in new message amplification tools like highlighting and pinning. o Theyll need to understand which posts should be boosted via paid media and to whom, while understanding how each post was amplified and how that impacted engagement numbers. It will be the CMs task to tell the story the brand wants to tell. o This means going back through all the posts, and deleting/hiding posts that the brand would no longer want to communicate, and keeping posts that were highly engaging or posts that communicated an important message during that time.

In all, Community Managers need to consistently manage not only whats going on in live time, but manage how the brand is portrayed to the community in the past.

Reinforcing the brand story through brand milestones and past events on the timeline Building out the brand story will now be both more effective and necessary since timeline makes it incredibly easy to scroll through years worth of brand posts going back over a hundred years or more as needed. Unique brand milestones, humanizing moments, and revolutionary updates/changes should all be "starred" to inform users what is at the heart of the brand. Cover Photos/Profile Pics A brand's cover photo will be the way a brand expresses themselves creatively. In contrast, the profile picture should be of their logo, which should change only as often as the brands logo changes. Pinning the most important/timely content With the ability to pin posts to the top of the timeline, brands will have the ability to showcase their most significant information/news for up to 7 days.

Content Strategy Pressure is on for strong content with page posts. Visually engaging posts (photos, videos) generate 2x more engagement than other types. Page posts should also be optimized for page posts ads, which have much higher CTR when with photos or videos.

How do brands/agencies shift efforts toward delivering stronger page publishing? o Optimization Community managers must understand average post benchmarks and determine when to pin content. Similarly, the CM should understand which posts speak strongly to the community about the brand, and should highlight these posts. Each brand should have their own guidelines for Pinning and Starring. Milestones Brands need to go back and create the story for the brand. Add milestones not just for FB achievements but for the brand as a whole. Determine what kind of creative you want to use to showcase the milestones Offers Facebook has socialized what they formerly introduced as Facebook Deals by including offers that will be visible in the feed. The ability of a brand to provide exclusive opportunities for their fans will drive users to become curious/spread WOM about these opportunities.

CONSIDERATIONS RE: LIKE-GATING AND APPS Like-Gating: Previously, when a non-fan visited a like-gated App on your Page, they could click like and the App would automatically refresh to unlock the content/experience that rewards the user for their Like. With the conversion to Timeline, we seem to have lost the ability to automatically present the consumer with the Like-gated content/experience after they click Like. The consumer would have to manually refresh the Page with the browser to see what has been unlocked. To see this new flow and its consequences in action, try this App attached to the Hyundai Worldwide Page: https://www.facebook.com/Hyundaiworldwide/app_145925762146680 If you have already liked Hyundai Worldwide, you may Unlike it by going to their Page and choosing Unlike from the options menu - the gear icon below the right side of the Cover Photo. Whether this change represents Facebooks officially discouraging Like-Gating as a practice, or is simply an unintended consequence of their implementation of Page Apps in the new format, remains to be seen. Page Apps and Timeline Publishing: Page Apps now have the option for a wider presentation space than previously, meaning that Facebook may soon expand the width of a Page App View from 520 to 780 pixels. The ability to create full-spread Timeline posts (Starred posts) and Pinned posts, were able to be more specific and strategic about how we publish content to our fans. This new, large-format post is presumably available to Video and Rich content as well as to Image posts, meaning that a brands Timeline is a much richer presentational avenue than the older Wall format. Additionally, by pinning large-format Rich content to the head of a brands Timeline, it may be possible to recreate aspects of the custom tab experience to an extent. Were currently exploring these possibilities.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES FROM FACEBOOK Facebooks Official Interactive Training Websites: Pages: http://www.learnfacebookpages.com/ Insights: http://www.learnpageinsights.com/ Facebook Timeline Overview/Anatomy of the Timeline http://www.facebook.com/business/fmc/guides/pages Watch the fMC Keynotes and Produce Intro Videos http://www.facebook.com/business/fmc Best Practices by Industry Vertical http://www.facebook.com/business/fmc/guides/verticals Official Guides (Print PDF Versions) Complete Product Guide: http://ads.ak.facebook.com/ads/FacebookAds/Pages_Product_Guide_022812.pdf Pages Overview: http://ads.ak.facebook.com/ads/FacebookAds/Pages_Overview.pdf