Facebook Studio is a showcase of of some of the best Facebook Marketing campaigns from around the world, which are presented live by the Facebook team each year. They also take the opportunity to present the latest news from the Facebook Headquarters -- what they're working on, new features, and the latest thoughts from some of the world's top Facebook marketing minds.
In true Facebook style, it was unlike most corporate conferences -- high energy and very informal. Hosted at Sydney's industrial-artsy Carriageworks building, we were lucky enough to have some of Palo Alto's finest technorati make the trip over to talk about marketing and advertising on this gigantic, ever-growing social network.
Some of the speakers included Paul Borrud, Head of Facebook Australia, Mark D'Arcy, Facebook's Director of Global Creative Solutions, Lars Rasmussen, Facebook's Director of Engineering (and the guy who created Google Maps), Jeff Kanter, Facebook's Product Manager, and Jesse Dwyer, Director of Communication and Strategy on Facebook.
In the essence of giving and empowering (one of Traffika's core values), I'm going to give a quick run-down of the cliff notes I took down from the day.
Facebook Actions & Gestures
Facebook "Actions" give developers the ability to create an action or a gesture for any piece of content. Actions are an evolution from the "Like" button (see the top of this blog post for an example), and will allow companies to create their own customised actions. For example, instead of "Liking" a news article, I can say that I'm "reading" it, or I could be "drinking" a Coke, "watching" Sherlock Holmes, or "partying" at a night club.
These actions are pushed into my Facebook Timeline and visible to my friends through their News Feed and, most importantly, clicking the button writes that particular piece of data into my social identity on Facebook, making it easier for marketers to target me with more specific and relevant messages.
And for those who have been waiting for a "Dislike" button on Facebook, this is the feature you've been waiting for. All actions are customisable so a developer could create a Dislike button if they so desired, however placing this button next to a piece of your own content may cause un-wanted side effects.
Actions have just been rolled out in the US and should be available to Australian websites within the usual waiting period (around 2 months). It will be exciting to see the new wave of customisations appearing on websites once this feature is opened up.
Page Admin Tools
Product Manager, Jeff Kanter, said they are working on better tools for Page Administrators and should soon have a solution for setting different publishing rights to different Page Admins.
This would be strongly welcomed by businesses who have one central Facebook Page which is managed by multiple stores or managers, as it would allow them to limit the amount of access and publishing rights that certain people have on the Page. It would also help brands to increase the amount of monitoring and interaction on their Page while sticking to their social media policy.
While Facebook is committed to these types of top-level adjustments, they still rely on third party developers to create complete Facebook Page Management Solutions. As such, their focus is on making their APIs as accessible and customisable as possible and encouraging third party applications to meet the needs of individual brands.
Insights
Jeff also spoke briefly about Facebook Insights, which are the metrics available to any Facebook Page administrator and include data like Page visits, number of comments and fan demographics.
While there are some of us who would like access to every detailed metric possible about our Pages, Facebook prefers to provide data on the insights most relevant to the Facebook Pages platform. This includes metrics like levels of engagement, the performance of your Page's content, and the behaviours of your Facebook community.
Facebook is always open to feedback on their Page Insights so feel free to contact one of their teams if you'd like to propose any enhancements or customisations, however I get the feeling that the new Facebook Timeline will need to be rolled out in its entirety (both on personal and brand Pages) before we see too many more changes in this area.
Photos
One last piece of information shared yesterday that I thought was really incredible is the sheer volume of photos being shared and hosted on Facebook. I think I heard these stats correctly but maybe someone else could confirm since they are so mind-boggling.
- Facebook alone accounts for 5% of the entire number of photos ever taken in the history of photography
- There are around 140 billion photos currently hosted on Facebook, 70 billion of which were uploaded last year.
- There are around 250 million photos uploaded to Facebook every day (that's 2,300 photo uploads every second!)
Overall it was a fantastic day and great to see Facebook recognising the huge growth of their platform in Australia.
Your Predictions
With the rapid adoption of Facebook in Australia and the raft of new features recently released, what do you think we'll be discussing about Facebook this time next year? Video calling? Facebook shopping?Personal privacy? Anything is possible, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Chris
is a specialist in Social Media Strategy at
Traffika.
Join Chris on Google+.
