Facebook is moving fast, adding features, changing settings and slightly altering the way advertisers design and manage their social media campaigns. Moreover, it doesn’t look like that’s going to change any time soon. This makes keeping up with the news very important for social media advertisers.
According to recent research by Hitwise, Facebook has become the most popular site in the United States, they even overtook Google in terms of hits at the beginning of March this year. This just reinforces the fact that Facebook is top of mind for advertisers. However, creating a successful brand presence on Facebook is not always easy, in part because of all the changes that have been going on lately. Late 2009, Facebook passed the break-even-point (as reported by Reuters) and the company is continually exploring ways to improve opportunities for advertisers. While this process can be jarring at times, Facebook has a track record for innovating through this process.
The fact that Facebook innovates rapidly can make it hard to keep up. But more than that, some innovations don’t go over well with users or developers, leading the company to repeal changes shortly after announcing them. For instance, for some time Facebook has allowed users to create custom landing tabs, giving brands an opportunity to put their best foot forward on their fan pages. In other words, this enabled brands to direct visitors to a custom page directly instead of having them land on the wall first. About a week ago Facebook announced on its developers forum that they would stop allowing brands to set up custom tabs if they had less than 10,000 fans. But then, only 24 hours later they decided to take it all back due to strong objections from brands and developers.
Another example is the recent debate about privacy. When Facebook introduced the open graph platform at the F8 developers conference in April this year, users became upset and worried about how the site treated their private information. This again led Facebook to announce this week that it would roll back some of the privacy changes (as reported by AdAge.com).
This back and forth can be a challenge as brands define a strategy for investment on the platform, but being aware of how Facebook works should lead brands to take a more agile approach to their initiatives. As a Facebook Preferred Developer, we have unique insight into Facebook, but even we have to work hard to keep our platform up to date and consistent with Facebook. The good news is that the Facebook team is awesome and super fast to respond to changes.
The moral of this story? Don’t freak out when Facebook experiments with new policies, just express your opinion in an open forum and they’ll respond accordingly. And, if you’ve got questions about what’s coming next give us a ring, we may either know the answer to your specific question or get it for you from the Facebook team.
Leave a response