The pages were assessed BEFORE timeline was adopted on the 29^th Feb and a month after. Engagement comparisons were then made between the two periods. It’s worth bearing in mind that the real acid test will be a month from today – once all pages have had the chance to adopt and adapt to timeline.

So what are the big learnings?

In all but the top volume pages, engagement figures have had a marked increase, whilst 10m+ pages have seen a general decline in all engagement areas.

The BIG takeaway: Pure fan volume should no longer be your primary focus when evaluating Facebook’s effectiveness.

So what content is now seeing the most engagement?

The data analysed 4,800 posts over the month from which we can draw the following conclusions:

Pre-timeline

• Status updates were the best ways to generate likes and comments, outperforming the next best post type by 21.8% and 17% respectively
• Video posts were the best way to generate shares, outperforming the next best type of post by 69.5%

Post-timeline

• Status updates continue to generate the most likes, outperforming the next best post type by 21.1%
• Photos are marginally better than status updates at generating comments, generating more comments by 8.3%
• Videos are now comfortably the very best way of generating shares, beating the next best post type, photos by 90%

The BIG takeaway: Timeline is clearly working best for visual media. Dig out as much visual content as you can. Consider also, in your new posts, how you can tie in a visual to support the status.

What about Pinned Posts and Features Posts?

At this early stage, there is a mixed message. This table compares pre-timeline posts and compares them to the subsequent featured and pinned posts.

It’s pretty clear that whilst featured (full width) posts have little impact on likes and comments, they are significantly the most shared type of format.

Photos as pinned posts are achieving significant value across likes and shares types – but use them wisely. In many cases at the moment, pinned posts are replacing the like gate to point people to apps so don’t be alarmed if they generate fewer comments than the average.

The BIG takeaway: Use featured video posts to generate the most engagement across the board. At this stage, full-width, quality video is a honey trap for fans – but choose your content wisely. Photos appear to have the most significant impact as pinned posts. Consider how you might use this pinning to feature fans or new products, and even replace status updates with a photo to maximize engagement and shares.

The full Wildfire research is below:
How Timeline is starting to impacting engagement for brands

Facebook’s changes include increased sharing apps (Facebook teamed up with 60-plus partners to enable frictionless sharing of content to Facebook), Facebook premium ads that are entirely social in nature, and Timeline for Pages (the most recent change, which I was privileged to see before general release).

With close to 800 million users, Facebook draws people and friends by itself, which is significant. The recent announcements demonstrate a desire to also use applications and tools as major drivers in Facebook’s next period of growth.

In the 2006-2007 app rush, there was a flood of interest in Facebook because users and brands could do more in Facebook than ever. Fast-forward four years. We’re in the same boat—except this time, the apps integrated into Facebook are proven successful services, bringing millions of members with them.

These services relied on people wanting to spend time away from Facebook (for music, news, etc.) but the emerging trend (not just in apps, but new services, too) seems to be one of creating new experiences in Facebook.

Are the Apps Up to the Job?

At the moment, this really only applies to Spotify. And as an app, it is basic. Spotify Mobile updates seem erratic, more about basic bug-fixing than new features. Its desktop app updates are even rarer. Spotify’s biggest advantage—creating playlists—is also its biggest downfall. Creating playlists is easy, but it’s nigh on impossible to organize them.

Sound familiar? This is exactly the problem that Google+ and Facebook are managing with friend lists. Apple has managed the problem with iPod, so what is Spotify’s solution? This issue of noise is only going to get worse as more and more friends experience musical serendipity.

Spotify and all entertainment services now need to consider themselves social platforms. Spotify is a social platform that plays music rather than just a music-playing one with sharing functionality, and this will require a fair amount of innovation based on what exists at the moment.

This is a significant change in mindset.

Frictionless Sharing and Privacy Issues

Spotify’s integration with Facebook is now so tight that new users have to have a Facebook account to make it work. Furthermore, anything and everything you play on Spotify, wherever it may be being played, is now being fed back into Facebook. While this admittedly causes concerns about sharing what you might secretly listen to, this integration is a brilliant way to find stuff that you didn’t know about or to discover what your friends are listening to.

As Brian Solis suggests, this change alone is forcing us to re-evaluate what we believe privacy is. We have all traditionally been free and easy with our information, but that’s because we have been in control of what is public, even if it is to a limited number of circles or friend lists. Now, everything has changed. Are we happy to have the people we consider friends alter their judgment of who we are due to our listening and reading habits?

Ask yourself this question: Has the benefit of finding new music or even favorites you’d forgotten been of more value to you than anything embarrassing your friends might have seen?

What this frictionless sharing introduces properly into our lives is genuine serendipity. For the last five years, services and algorithms have been trying to find ways to only show us the things that it thinks interest us.

Trust Usurps Influence

This brings me onto the issue of influence. We are all influential about all sorts of different topics—yet we will happily accept advice from our closest friends about a topic, track, film, or pair of shoes. The same applies to music and news.

As apps and services wake up to the opportunities that tighter social integration brings, I expect the trust we have in our friends to introduce  more experiences and products than we currently see. This brings one massive headache with it: How do we measure this influence?

Are We Doing This Because We Can or Because People Want It?

In the span of two weeks, Facebook has introduced Friend Lists, Subscriptions, a mini-stream, new profiles and timeline, integration with Spotify, and news apps. But are everyday Facebook users (people who just use it to communicate with friends) capable of understanding the benefits of all this innovation?

Are we likely to see everyday Facebook users divide their friends into specific friend lists and subscribe to different bits of content from each list? I suggest not. Are they going to be massively concerned seeing the content they interact with now auto-posted to their Walls? Yes. Are they going to be massively concerned that sites they visit outside of Facebook are being fed back to Facebook? Yes.

Cookie issues aside (which Facebook is now addressing) and complex account management aside, “chain statuses” with scary stories of what can be seen on your Facebook Wall and what data Facebook can see are abundant. Everyday users are scared. However, all these changes are necessary to ensure that we have a way to manage what will become a deluge of information from streaming movies to music and news.

Noise management is perhaps the most crucial aspect underpinning all of these changes. Facebook is becoming our main window to the Web, but we need a proper way of managing this information.

What Does This Mean to You?

You will now have to “think social” because Facebook is now forcing your hand. And by “thinking social”, I don’t mean broadcasting your messages through social channels, No longer can a strategy be based around the “if” of Facebook; it is now more of a “must.” And that is not just about Facebook Pages either. You must now consider how your brand can be social. And being social is not, as we all know, about simply using old message techniques on new platforms. It is about behaving differently and taking a fresh look at your product and service in entirely new ways.

However you look at it, the world has just changed. Massively.

(Photo courtesy of Bigstock: Happy Group of Finger Faces)

Below is a summary of the main points you need to take note of:

1. Cover Photo
As you will have seen from your personal timeline, your profile picture now has a large, landscape image. This will need to be 851 x 315 pixels wide, as below. The most important aspect of this is that Facebook are now making it explicitly clear that you will NOT be allowed to use this cover to sell, or direct people to take actions (i.e. an arrow pointing to the “Like” button)

2. Profile picture

The profile picture remains largely unchanged, although you will need to re-size this to the new size of  180 x 180 pixels.

3. About Section and Apps – REALLY IMPORTANT

There are some largely cosmetic changes to the “About” this page text which is so often ignored or unread in the previous Page format. The new About text block takes much more prominence on the new Page layout, so make sure your first 2 lines are as exciting and compelling as they can be.

Sitting next to this section is the list of Apps assigned to the Page. All apps are now listed in the header with 111 x 74 images rather than the small icons you will be used to. The order of apps in the grid can be moved around so that your current most popular app is seen more prominently:

IMPORTANT: The real technical change to Pages affects something which we have all become accustomed to – landing pages. Facebook has now removed the ability to set a default landing tab, meaning that Like Gates are a thing of the past.  This is why it will be so crucial to ensure that your app makes the very most of the new icon size it has.

4. Pinned posts

Pinned posts are posts which the administrators have decided should feature more prominently than anything else, as below (the small yellow flag):

The small yellow flag is an indicator that this is the post that the administrator wants to bring your focus to. So, however much content is created by either the Page or Fans, this post will remain at the top of the Page. You may know this in another form as a “sticky” post. In doing so, Facebook believes that this will bring the old “default landing tab” approach to a wider range of content.

5. Larger stories

New Pages are a much more visual affair, with much more prominence given to video and images. This has been evident in Edgerank i.e. how much of your content is visible within fans’ news streams – with much more weighting (visibility) given to images and videos.

6. Better Admin tools

If you’re not using SMMP (Social Media Management Platforms) such as Buddy Media or Syncapse, you’ll be pleased at how much more sophisticated the new Admin dashboard and tools are.

As you can see from the drop-down menu, you have a much more organised and centralised way of managing your page, even to the point of being able to list and adjust the visibility of items you have posted:

SUMMARY:

Change is Good:

There is most certainly a more creative angle to new Pages layout, which from our experience we think most admins will find much easier to use. There’s no getting away from the fact that it will take most admins a little while to adjust to the layout so DO spend time looking around the Preview version of your page to play with all of the features. You can’t break the Page until you press PUBLISH!

Beware Engagement Levels:

When you change your Page, different assets will feature to a greater or lesser extent that they do now. Take a BENCHMARK of your content performance before you change over and track for a good week or 2, how that content performs, as well as against all new content that gets posted.

Apps:

You can no longer determine which App receives prominence, thereby locking non-fans out until they like the Page. Apps now have to fight for attention like all other content. The “pinning” of content to be made sticky will help bring some focus to apps/content but any apps in planning for go-live of post 30th March may need a rethink.

Remember, you can change over at ANY TIME, but the changes will be enforced by 30th MARCH 2012.

Official documentation is here:

Facebook Timeline for Pages

The indication below suggests that a much more social, but importantly ACTION-led suite of Facebook ads are now due to roll out. Ads which, at their heart are largely driven by the actions and inteactions of fans with your content. In this regard, this is nothing new, but the interesting considerations will be three-fold:

1) Interaction/engagement rates will climb, as will the costs – ads with social references have always out-performed standard ads (wonder of this is why Facebook dropped their average CPC rates recently). It’s easy to see how Facebook will earn more from the new version of the old!

2) How this will affect edgerank – the largely unknown aspect of edgerank has been the weighting criteria. What priority is Facebook giving to different media? The suggestion here is that  Facebook are expecting ads (and therefore your content) to become much more interactive, multimedia-focussed. Your content plan (if it isn’t already) needs to reflect this.

3) Will Facebook soon start generating social ad content off your frictionless shared content? If it is already including you in ads based on your in-page gestures such as likes, comments and shares, it is more then feasible that we will see frictionlessly-shared content appearing in ads before long. The article you read, the track you listened to, might soon all become targetable in ad campaigns!

Exciting times, come what may!
Facebook Premium Ads Overview

…first, Path, the social network whose modus operandi is limiting your personal network to 150 of your closest friends decides to upload all your personal contacts you granted it access to “in order to better personalise your experience”, then Pinterest, the fastest-growing start-up on the planet with just shy of 10m unique users (and still in beta!), reveals that when possible, it adds affiliate links to the content that you, the user, pins to your boards.

On the Facebook front, we have the widespread rejection of in-stream sponsored stories, brand/page advocacy by mere “fanship” of a Page, the 2011 integration with Spotify and the January announcement of 60 seamless sharing media partners and you begin to see an emerging, simmering suspicion that Facebook is looking to heavily ramp up its advertising/commercial initiatives post-IPO in order to bring the kinds of profits and dividends investors will demand – all off the back of your personal information.

The issue seems not, in Pinterest’s case, that they are making money from users (most users are very clear that Facebook uses their data in a less direct, but similar way), nor in Path’s case that they are collecting the data at all (it happens all the time when users grant access to an app/api) – the issue is entirely one of trust and disclosure which presents untold challenges for individuals and law-makers alike.

What we know as privacy has changed immeasurably from just a year ago and whilst we are increasingly comfortable with both the quantity and nature of what we share and when, the commercial thirst for using personal data for financial gain (often a financial gain that is not ours) has the potential to bring the whole personalised web pack of cards falling down around our ears.

We are on a knife edge with trust and privacy, with Facebook especially, pushing serious boundaries of user tolerance and legal boundaries. Despite the ASA remit now covering social media, law makers are struggling to catch up with a rate of change and innovation that is being thrust upon users in the social space.

As a result I think we are most certainly in a strange period of creatively-led law making rather than one in which businesses are required to operate within clear, unambiguous current law. And I don’t see this changing for some time – until the inevitable BIG data abuse happens, where two things will happen. 1. Users will revolt and disappear/revoke access to their data and 2. Law makers will impose “hammer to crack a walnut” style laws, governing the way personal/social data is handled in a strictly limiting, broad way.

If the law makers can’t keep up with the rate of change, then the first or perhaps second, major data abuse will bring about a blanket limitation on what we will be able to do. So, for all our sakes, everybody, please disclose, disclose, disclose…

Here’s my slides – which are deliberately simple…so let me know what you think!

At the other end of the scale, we have audiences populating social media channels talking about what it is that they just watched, or, in the case of the Apprentice – giving the “characters” a real bashing on Twitter as they play out on our screens.

And, floating around somewhere beyond social media TV we have transmedia storytelling – a multi-screen or multi-platform way to tell and interact with the same television story – extending the programme’s reach and almost turning consumption almost into experiential.

In 2009, we saw Obama’s inauguration all being streamed live through Facebook, in 2010 The Jonas Brothers broadcast interactive, live streaming gigs and interviews through Facebook and last year, the Black Eyed Peas broadcast a Google Plus Hangout via a laptop at the back of their stage. So we are already some way on with social tv, but not in any consistent way which audiences are now expecting.

I think his year we will see much more of events like Channel 4′s How to save £100bn event – where tweets and comments from external networks were filtered in, in real-time to the show presenter and became the topic for debate. The content also provided additional visual stimulus which again, formed the basis for discussion in the show.

Also expect to see more play-along activity, such as that already being run with The Million Pound Drop. Viewers can play along with the questions on tv, on their computers, interact with a live-show twitter account, appear on the show themselves and can follow the stories of the contestants and behind-the-scenes material is broadcast through Facebook to maintain dialogue between shows.

And, with Celebrity Big Brother experimenting allowing viewers to pay for votes with Facebook Credits, we are going to see a much more interactive television experience in 2012.

There are now so many social networks and so many conversations taking place away from conventional websites, that their original purpose has evolved to the point where many have become redundant. What were brochureware websites are now becoming interactive conversations on social channels about what the product is, how it works, what is good or bad about it.

With Google assigning more authority and visibility to social channels, more and more real-time, opinion-forming content is appearing within search results – influencing the next-click decision (or even purchasing decision) before people have even arrived at your previously visible brand site.

As such, it will be crucial for websites that are in development this year to understand how they can better integrate social content into their websites – whether that be brand mentions sitting alongside brochureware pages, user-generated reviews or images sitting alongside product or simply a list of bookmarks to social channels where product is being mentioned – all will help to ensure that rather than arrive, then leave your site to find opinion-influencing social content, customers will be able to make a balanced purchasing decision on your site.

Criticisms of ROI-aside, it’s fair to say that whilst there has been some standardisation of social media metrics in the last 18 months, 2012 will take things a whole league further by integrating social media metrics into conventional CRM (customer relationship management) systems thereby closing a significant loop, or missing piece of the social media ROI jigsaw.

Whilst referral traffic from social networks provides some evidence of the influence of social networking channel interactions on purchasing decisions, we will begin to see this year, the ability to integrate these brand interactions with actual purchaser behaviour which will present untold conversion modelling and customer journey insights. Whilst cookies are great (within the allowance of the European Privacy Directive) , the one thing they do not show is the influence that social interactions have.

The number of times a customer tweets us, likes a status, checks-in or leaves a comment or brand/product mention will soon be able to sit alongside their purchasing habits so we can begin to see exactly how frequently we need to interact, the nature of the social interactions they interact with and the kinds of topics they are interested in are all clues as to what it takes to get them to the page and convert into a sale.

Add in the power of dynamic personalisation and in 2012, I think we will see the introduction of some really, really smart technology.

The ASOS experiment which made up so many of the headlines has gone quiet and ASOS have (not surprisingly) kept the results of their shop close to their chests – but are Facebook shops ALL social commerce has to offer?

As we have already seen in other videos, the increasing integration of our Facebook data – “the opening of the social graph” into applications, mobiles, the websites we use, as well as now ubiquitous checkins means that at every turn, we are AUTOMATICALLY able to see what our friends are doing, where they are, what they have watched, what they have bought or quite simply, what track they have just listened to.

i.e. things that WE may also want to do or buy.

Now whilst this is nothing new to anyone involved in word of mouth marketing, the big difference is that all of these actions, pre-2012 required a conscious decisions to post to our networks. As such, many of the actions which may have influenced a friend to rent the same film, buy the track their friend is listening to, or be the first to buy the dress that 2 of their friends were looking at on Site X were missing.

2012 will be a much larger and commercially-focussed one for the understanding of what social commerce actually is – the influencing of purchasing decisions through the integration of social data (profile and friends).