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Mobile Monday – Is Facebook Strengthening Its Mobile Muscle?

Monday, August 27th, 2012

This post is part of the weekly ‘Mobile Monday‘ series on news, ideas, and strategies in the world of mobile devices.

For a while now, mobile has been Facebook’s biggest weakness. More than half of all active Facebook users access the social network from mobile devices, but their experiences couldn’t be compared to the desktop Facebook experience. Many components of the mobile apps were poor, and Facebook hadn’t truly figured out how to monetize mobile. But last week, Facebook’s mobile muscles may have gotten a little stronger.

Facebook’s Instagram Acquisition Cleared

First, the Federal Trade Commission finally cleared Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram on August 22. Facebook announced its plans to acquire Instagram back in April, at which time the FTC opened an antitrust investigation regarding the acquisition. As Facebook continues to try to monetize mobile, the big question of whether or not ads are coming to Instagram remains.

The hypothetical Instagram advertisements have the potential to be unlike most other mobile advertisements. Given the visual nature of the app, advertisements would need to be so as well to belong in the stream. Ads on Instagram have the potential to allow highly visual brands to showcase their products.

Picture an advertisement for a local bakery featuring a picture of a shelf full of delicious pastries with an appropriate Instagram filter and a caption describing the day’s specials. Such an advertisement wouldn’t scream “THIS IS AN AD!” but rather, would blend in to the stream, which probably has several other pictures of food. Instagram advertisements could possibly give visual brands with a presence on Instagram already the chance to promote their best photos.

Facebook’s New iOS App

Facebook’s mobile app for iOS devices had been criticized for its clunkiness – it was slow, it was unresponsive, and it frequently crashed. Part of the problem was that it relied on HTML5. But on Thursday, an update came to the Facebook iOS app that promised a better experience for mobile users.

The app is now written in iOS’s native codebase, Objective-C, which makes the app a lot faster. Because of this, you can now see real-time updates in your news feed, and you can see how many new stories you have and tap the alert to view them. Likes, comments, and notifications are also easier to view now. Overall, the app is much more responsive, and responds quickly and seamlessly.

Facebook’s secondary apps have also been integrated into the core Facebook iOS app. These secondary apps are the Facebook Messenger app and the Facebook Camera app. Both apps were seen as peculiar at their introductions; why not just bring them into the core app? Messages looked completely different in the Facebook iOS app and the Facebook Messenger app, and photos were a similar situation. Fortunately, the code for both of these apps have been brought into the main Facebook app. Lastly, Facebook Timeline has finally come to the iPad.

This improved app is the first step in Facebook’s goal to becoming a “mobile first” company and effectively monetizing the mobile experience. While no changes were made specifically in terms of mobile revenue, no such changes would have been effective without first improving the mobile experience. The improved Facebook app will surely have more iOS users spending more time in the app (using it, not waiting for it to respond).

What else do you think Facebook needs to do to fix its mobile problems?

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Tags: Facebook, Facebook Timeline, FTC, instagram, mobile, mobile apps, Mobile Monday
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Google+ Introduces a Familiar Redesign

Thursday, April 12th, 2012

Yesterday, Google+ got a huge makeover, but the look is very familiar. There’s no doubt that the redesign looks good (with the possible exception of the white space already being mocked), but web users question the value of the redesign. Google’s main problem with their social network is the lack of unique value. If anything, the redesign amplifies this. Let’s take a look at some new features:

Customizable navigation ribbon: This feature seems original enough. Rather than the top navigation bar, there is now a “ribbon” along the left edge of the screen that is completely customizable. You can show/hide apps and rearrange them, and hovering over an app’s icon will reveal quick actions you can do from any page.

Profile page: The new profile page looks eerily similar to Facebook Timeline. There is even a cover photo.

Bigger photos and video: Once again, a change Facebook already went through.

More prominent chat: Yet again, a feature that now looks more like Facebook chat.

Explore: There is now an ‘Explore’ page that displays “interesting” and trending content from the site. Users can adjust how much of this content will go directly to their stream on the home page. This is not reminiscent of a Facebook feature but rather the “Discover” tab that Twitter introduced.

Dedicated ‘Hangouts’ page: There is now a separate page for Hangout information, including a list of all of your invitations to Hangouts as well as a list of public and on-air Hangouts you can join.

While the design was well-received and many still consider it more ‘beautiful’ than Facebook, it still lacks originality. As you can see, there are very few original aspects of the redesign. As Fast Company brilliantly commented: “A lot of what Google announced today was pure catch-up.”

Google+ is trying to make something that already exists. There is the argument that they are doing it better: with circles, integration into other Google products, etc. Its one feature that is successfully unique is Hangouts, so it’s good to see that they are trying to put more focus on that by giving Hangouts is own page. But at this point, trying to replace Facebook and Twitter will not work. It’s too late.

Look at Pinterest: it is succeeding and became the huge social network it is now because of its uniqueness. Sure, Google+ may look better than Facebook, but it’s still very similar. Google should be thinking of ways to make Google+ stand out, rather than trying to be everything.

So, readers, we’d like your opinion. Will this new design increase how often you use Google+, if you use it at all? Please share!

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Tags: Facebook Timeline, Google, Google Plus, social media
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Madonna’s Social Launch of MDNA

Thursday, April 5th, 2012

Madonna has never had much of a presence on social media, but she is a woman known for reinventing herself time and time again. For her 12th studio album, MDNA which came out on March 26, she has sworn off traditional methods of promotion such as posing for magazine covers and performing on morning shows. This has allowed her to spend less time traveling all over the country and more time rehearsing for her upcoming tour. Instead of interacting with middle men to promote her album, she is going directly to the fans.

Facebook engagement

Madonna only conducted one in-person interview, sitting down with Jimmy Fallon on March 24. But even that had a social aspect. The interview was broadcasted via livestream on her Facebook page, and you needed to “Like” the page in order to watch the live interview. The interview took place in a makeshift studio at Facebook’s New York office. The audio was a little hard to hear at times, but you could still hear Fallon’s hilarious comments while they listened to parts of the album. Fallon and Madonna exchanged banter about her classic ‘Borderline’ and Madonna went on to sing a few lines. Madonna even taught Fallon some dance moves, which the Facebook employees in the audience thoroughly enjoyed! Fallon also asked Madonna questions that fans were submitting in real time.

In preparation for the livestream, her manager, Guy Oseary worked with Facebook to fill out her timeline with old music videos, live performances, and photo shoots. Sneak previews of tracks from MDNA were released and shared on Facebook leading up to the album’s release, and fans can even answer polls asking which songs from her previous albums she should perform on her upcoming tour.

Madonna’s big Twitter debut

Up until a few weeks ago, Madonna had no presence on Twitter. But she began tweeting from @MadonnaMDNAday the day before MDNA’s release on March 26. Then on the day of the release she hosted a live Twitter chat using the #askmadonna hashtag. She tweeted with Ryan Seacrest, Ellen Degeneres, and thousands of fans who had been submitting questions for a few days leading up to the chat, as well as in real-time.

Fans asked questions about her vocal warm-ups, her favorite foods, and her opinions of other celebrities such as Justin Bieber. Madonna really liked the suggestion of one participant to film her next tour in 3D, giving fans yet another thing to look forward to in the pop diva’s career.

While it was originally said that Madonna was only joining Twitter for one day, she appears to still be tweeting. She is still answering fan questions as well as engaging with celebrities such as Lionel Richie and Jessie J. She has even had a Twitter conversation with Britney Spears about reenacting their on-stage liplock on her upcoming tour, and personally inviting Katy Perry and President Obama to her concerts.

Listening to MDNA

The new promotion methods aren’t just limited to live chats on social media sites. Up until April 1, members of the design-focus daily deals site Fab.com had the opportunity to buy a deluxe version of MDNA for just $7.99, almost half of what it costs from other outlets. Fab.com even dedicated its homepage to MDNA.

Spotify users can enter for a chance to win premium tickets to her sold-out U.S. tour. Users that listen to MDNA three time’s during the first three weeks that it’s out will be entered into the contest, and they can boost their chances of winning by also signing up for a “Madonna Superfans” newsletter.

Do you think Madonna’s latest reinvention of her image will be effective?

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Tags: celebrities, Facebook, Facebook Timeline, livestream, music, online music, social media, Twitter, twitter chats
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3 Brand Pages with Great Timelines

Thursday, March 1st, 2012

Facebook Timeline for brand pages was only announced yesterday, but brands have already showed tremendous innovation in updating their pages. Brand pages, with their big and beautiful cover photos, have the ability to become a detailed scrapbook of a brand’s history, past and present.

For most brands and companies, it will take time to fill in their entire history, if they even choose to do so. But of course big brands such as The New York Times, Verizon Wireless, and Coca-Cola have been anticipating this day since Timeline was announced for personal profiles. They have probably been creating and curating content and thinking of strategies for months now, so when they were able to enable Timeline yesterday they could quickly fill in their history. This may seem like it puts smaller brands at a disadvantage, but really it works out well. Because you can get ideas for your brand page from some of the content on these pages.

Here are some of our favorite brand pages so far, and why we think they make excellent examples of how to best utilize Timeline for your brand.

The New York Times

The brand page for The New York Times has done an amazing job with using Timeline for telling their story, from the first newspaper published in 1851.

From there, The New York Times has added numerous milestones, through which you can really see how it has become what it is today. You can find the exact day that a certain feature or section was added to the newspaper.

The New York Times has also uploaded and dated photos from The New York Times photo archives showing what it’s like to work “Inside The Times”.

Perhaps most importantly, they have pinned a post to the top of the Timeline that introduces it and explains how they will be using Timeline.

Verizon Wireless

Verizon Wireless has already figured out a way to use their cover photo to engage their fans. They are holding a contest called “30 Days. 30 Tablets.” where fans can submit photos of cityscapes or landscapes taken with cameras on their mobile devices. Winners will have themselves and their picture featured in the cover photo and possibly win a Droid XYBOARD 8.2 by Motorola.

Also, Verizon Wireless uses graphics to mark milestones and statistics about company growth, rather than just using text.

The Verizon Wireless Timeline is also like an old cell phone museum. They marked important moments in the mobile phone industry and uploaded pictures of old cell phones. Start at the bottom and scroll up to see how cell phones have evolved and wax nostalgic about your old phones!

Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola‘s cover photo is a beautiful example of how you can take a scrapbook/collage approach to your cover photo. Pay close attention to the page’s description: the page is a “collection of your stories”.

As you scroll through their Timeline, you see how true that is. Most of the content isn’t about Coca-Cola as a brand, it is about how Coca-Cola is part of our culture. For example, right after they mark introducing a new formula (“New Coke”) in the 80′s, they also show how the world reacted, leading to them changing it back.

Coca-Cola has also published stories about how Coca-Cola has been a part of people’s lives. There are stories about a husband and wife first meeting by sharing a Coke, someone drinking a cold Coke in their very first car, and other tales that demonstrate how much Coca-Cola is part of American culture. There were simply too many adorable stories to post here, so I encourage you to scroll through their Timeline!

We look forward to more brands filling in their Timelines this month and seeing how they decide to tell their stories! Have you seen other brand pages with Timelines you just love?

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Tags: brands on social media, Facebook, Facebook Timeline, social media, social media marketing, storytelling
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Facebook Timeline for Brands: Creates Sense of Identity

Wednesday, February 29th, 2012

Facebook’s launch of the Timeline for brand pages allows brands to showcase their unique stories and identities. Along with the added design of a “cover photo”, which helps display logos, products and personalities, the Timeline features the history of a company and their specific milestones. Milestones and posts that are “starred” by a company appear twice as wide as other posts, calling extra attention to important stories. The new landing page also shows how many of your friends like the brand, as well as your friends’ public mentions of related topics. For local businesses, a map appears in the row of apps below the cover photo as well. A new messaging feature allows users to send direct or private messages to your Page. This creates a new customer service channel where you can address users’ concerns without having to discuss issues publicly on your Page’s wall / Timeline.

The true value of the Timeline can be seen on Livestrong’s brand page. The page features personal milestones and history dating back to 1996, like photos of Lance Armstrong bed-ridden with cancer and his first win of the Tour de France title- “three years after being given a 40% chance to live”. This rich, emotional history that took place long before Facebook existed is now available for fans to interact with and get a sense of the community and culture that embodies Livestrong.

However, Facebook brand pages still have a downside that affect user engagement and return on investment. With the explosion of Pinterest as a hot new online community, we can see the benefit of being able to choose what content to follow based on interest. On Pinterest, a user can subscribe to a brand by selecting a specific board they are interested in, as opposed to following everything the brand posts. The issue with brand pages on Facebook is that there’s no way for fans to funnel what content they see. The brand pages lack user customization, meaning the brand is in control, rather than the fan.

If a brand’s audience doesn’t find value in their messages, it can hinder the company’s ROI, despite a large fan base. If Facebook brand pages could find a way to customize their messaging to niche target audiences, they could derive a lot more value through social media.

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Tags: brands on social media, Facebook, Facebook Timeline, intern post, social media, social media marketing, Stephanie Wight
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Facebook Timeline is here!

Thursday, December 15th, 2011

Months after Facebook announced Timeline at the f8 Developer’s Conference, it is finally available to anyone and everyone, as announced on the Facebook blog.

Timeline has been available through signing up for developer beta access since f8 and over 1 million people got early access this way. The “Beta” label was officially removed from Timeline’s name on December 6, and now any Facebook user can opt-in to activate theirs now.

To opt-in, you can visit the Introducing Timeline page and click “Get it now.” Soon enough, you will also see an announcement about Timeline at the top of your profile when you go to view it.

To ease the transition from the old profiles to the new Timelines, Facebook will give you a 7-day review period where no one else can see your Timeline. This gives you one week to review all of the content that appears on your Timeline and customize it through hiding and featuring stories as you wish. To see what your Timeline will look like to someone else, click the gear icon at the top of your page and select ‘View as…’ and you can see how your Timeline looks to a Facebook friend or the public. But seven days after you upgrade to Timeline, it will automatically go live to all of your Facebook friends. Of course, if you don’t need or want the review period, you can publish your Timeline at any time.

Facebook Timeline is also now available on Android devices and on Facebook’s mobile website, m.facebook.com. While Timeline is now available for any individual user, it will not be available for brand pages yet. Facebook never actually confirmed that there would be Timelines for brands, but a rep told Mashable that “Consistency in both functionality and appearance is really important to Facebook…so we hope to make Pages more consistent with the new Timeline in the future.”

As per usual with any change to Facebook, many users are not happy. And where better to voice your opinion about a social network than on a social network? For most of this morning, “Facebook Timeline” has been a Trending Topic on Twitter as Facebook users rave, rant, and review their experiences with Timeline. Many people have expressed frustration or concern over the effects “frictionless sharing” will have on their privacy, others just don’t care for the new look. It will be interesting over the next few weeks to see how different types of tech adopters react to Timeline.

For more information on how to use Facebook Timeline, check out our introduction to Timeline and Open Graph.

Have you seen your Timeline yet? What do you think?

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Tags: Facebook, Facebook Timeline, social media
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“Frictionless sharing” already causing friction

Thursday, September 29th, 2011

It was only a week ago that Mark Zuckerberg announced his “frictionless sharing” concept at the F8 conference. The concept goes like this: Facebook is all about sharing, and the old ways of sharing on Facebook supposedly had too much “friction.” If you wanted to share an activity, you clicked ‘Share’ or were asked if you wanted to post something to your wall. With the new “frictionless sharing,” users don’t need to do anything, Facebook automatically shares activity with your friends. But this new concept has not been met with the best reactions.

The frictionless sharing combined with Facebook’s new partnership with Spotify means that every song a user listens to on Spotify is shown on their profile/Timeline. Every. single. song. So if you listen to music on Spotify all day long, you would be doing some serious sharing. Also, friends would see what your guilty pleasure music was, and how often you listened to it. Luckily, Spotify has released an update to its app that has a “Private Listening mode” that keeps what you’re listening to off of Facebook until you choose otherwise.

Other concerns about frictionless sharing has been brought to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). In a joint letter, nine privacy groups including the ACLU have asked the FTC to look into Facebook’s practice of collecting data about users’ online activities while logged out of Facebook and automated sharing. In the letter, the groups said: “These changes in business practices give the company far greater ability to disclose the personal information of its users to its business partners than in the past. Options for users to preserve the privacy standards they have established have become confusing, impractical, and unfair.”

Do you want Facebook to automate sharing for you, or do you want to retain the ability to pick and choose what activity is posted?

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Tags: Facebook, Facebook Timeline, social media, social media privacy, spotify
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Introducing the New Facebook: Timeline and Open Graph

Friday, September 23rd, 2011

Yesterday was a monumental day in social networking history, also known as f8– Facebook’s developer conference. Everything you are accustomed to is about to change. Everything you do on the internet is about to be socialized. Forget about the “Like” button. In a couple months you’ll be saying, “Remember when we use to like things on the internet?” You and your friends will all laugh and reminisce about the old Facebook ::sigh::

But first, let’s talk about YOU. What changes are you going to see over the next couple weeks? The eZanga team has been looking through the new profile layout, which will be called your Timeline. Here’s a summary of the look, functionality and customization options:

TIMELINE: all of your stories, all of you apps, express who you are.

Just what it sounds like, Timeline will be chronicling the story of your life in an easy to use format. Facebook will automatically summarize and time stamp your past/present events including: photos, posts, tags, check-ins, groups, likes…well pretty much every click you ever made on Facebook, and then organize it in chronological order. The outlined blue box below enables you to jump to periods of time in your Facebook history.

‘Now’ is the majority of what is displayed on your Timeline (encompassing the past days and weeks), then breaks down to recent months, years, and decades. I know you’re probably thinking, “Decades…but Facebook hasn’t been around for decades?” Answer: Timeline allows you to go back in time (insert Back to the Future quote here) and fill in the moments of your life that occurred BEFORE Facebook time:

Yes, the When says “May 23, 2003″ the day and year eZanga.com was founded. I was even able to tag who I was with (eZanga co-founders Rich Kahn, CEO and wife Beth Kahn, CFO). Timeline allows you to add:

Work and education: Add a job, school or military affiliation
Family and Education: When you got engaged or married, add a child or pet, or when you lost a love one
Living: When you moved, bought a house or vehicle, and add a roommate
Health and Wellness: When you broke a bone, had surgery, or overcame an illness
Milestones and Experiences: When you learned a language, got your license, traveled, earned an achievement or award

(Each of these categories give you the option to add a default life event if it is not available)

“Expressing who you are” was major during the f8 conference. The biggest point to Timeline is being able to define who you are in a socially interactive way. Your favorite music, foods, television shows, movies, games etc, can be integrated into your personal Timeline. How’s that?

OPEN GRAPH: A New Class of Apps

Say hello to Open Graph, one of the second biggest changes to Facebook. We won’t be talking too much about this in the post today but here’s the jist: The “Like” will turn into VERB+NOUN and every actions you can perform (read, listen, watch, cook, run, search etc.) will take it’s place. Say what?!

Ok, here’s an example: Let’s say you are listening to music on Spotify. The New Facebook will let you share, “Jimmy Hoppa is LISTENING to Jeremiah was a Bull Frog on Spotify.”

The next Facebook Era is all about “Engagement” and connecting users in almost any way that is virtually possible, without ever leaving the site. So not only can you listen, but you can listen with your friends on Facebook! Open Graph is going to be the next wave to Social Business, Social Personal, Social Everything.

As we learn about the applications created using Open Graph, and the different ways businesses will use and integrate them into Facebook, we will post more.

There’s the overview. So tell me, how do you feel about the New Facebook?

Activate your Facebook Timeline here.

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Tags: Facebook, Facebook Timeline, open graph, spotify
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