At the developer conference f8 in September, Facebook announced some very important changes to the platform that every marketer should know about. Today we´d like to share a quick overview.

1) Timeline tells the story of your life

Facebook has made a complete re-design of how personal profiles look and function. Right now, Facebook is rolling this out step by step, so in case you haven´t seen it, this is how it looks:

 

The timeline feels like a journal, showing the information Facebook has available. Everybody has the possibility to add or delete entries, or make entries visible to special groups such as "friends only", or customized groups. Photos and applications are receiving more visibility.

2) News Feed and Ticker

The news feed shows posts as Top Stories and Recent Stories, so Facebook is prioritizing posts for you. Top Stories are high up, so now it is even more important that your own news feed stories have the potential to become Top Stories.

In addition on the right hand side, Facebook has introduced the Ticker. The ticker feels a bit Twitter-like, and shows everything which is going on in your network of friends. Posts, comments, likes and stories generated by applications all show in the ticker and users can engage and click on entries just like in the news feed.

3) Social Apps with Open Graph

Social apps offer a huge change in the way applications can interact with a user and the friends of users. It enables people to share content in their network on-the-fly and free of judgment. There are lot of things people want to share with their network, without the need to "like" it.

In an application, we can now define what somebody is doing with an object. Say your application is a recipe collection, people can review recipes, put in thier own recipes and so on. So far, Facebook would create a news feed story "xy is using recipe collection", and maybe people could like recipes.

Now, in applications we can define actions that are neutral. Simply telling your friends that you had a cooking session, without stating if it was a success. Facebook illustrates it this way:

In order to make sharing easy, applications can also send out news feed stories without an explicit permission from the user each time. It is now sufficient that the user gives permission one time at first usage. For our recipe collection, this means that the application can create a news feed story such as "xy is cooking Lasagna al Forno on Bestrecipe collection".

What an opportunity for brands to push out relevant information at scale by using the voice of real persons to their friends!

 If brands are serious about not oversharing content then the Social Apps can become an interesting way to communicate. We at SkandNet are very excited about these opportunities and do encourage companies to talk with us about how to develop suitable activities together.

 

4) Some good advice: Double check your apps are secure browsing enabled (https:)

Are you using Facebook on a https-connection? If not, switch to HTTPS for a moment to check how your fans which are using HTTPS are experiencing your Canvas and Page tab apps.

We think it is important that companies show that they are taking security issues seriously. Otherwise there might be a risk that people are seeing things like this instead of the content you want to show:

SkandNet Application on mashable.com

We were so honored that mashable.com was pointing out our application for blocket.se as one out of four successful and creative Facebook apps worldwide! Thanks mashable! See the full article:

"4 successful and creative Facebook Contests"

News from our App development department

If you would like to check out some of our latest application projects, you can do so by clicking on the following links:

Stimorol (Swedish Market, Sampling, API to "Kuponginlösen", Swedish Coupon Clearing network)

Mavshack (US Market, Contest with member registration)

Dishwashing liquid YES from P&G (Swedish Market, Contest with weekly changing content and winners)

Are you interested in more visibility on Facebook? Just drop a line to sales@skandnet.com or give us a call at +46-8-12032500.

Enjoy your day,
SkandNet Media AB