Facebook has been making some major changes over the past month as it pushes toward mobile. The changes have many implications for local businesses, mostly positive. Read on to stay ahead of the game.
Facebook is really pushing into mobile with this update, which aims to keep users engaged on Facebook as much as possible. Facebook claims that Home is “more than an app,” and that’s probably an accurate assessment. It replaces your lock screen and home screen with the Facebook feed, which you can swipe to scroll through, or double-tap to “like.”
Home also introduces chat heads, which show users who they’re messaging with, and which they can continue using while they’re using other apps. Notifications also pop up when a piece of social content is meant specifically for you, like when somebody posts on your timeline.
Facebook Home is for Android devices, but Facebook messaging updates for iPhone bring a few of these changes over, including the chat heads. A new feature called “stickers” lets users attach advanced smiley’s to their messages. The changes don’t make Facebook as ubiquitous on the iPhone as Facebook Home does, but they very well could expand the amount of time people spend in the app.
2. New Event Invite Limitations
From now forward, it’s impossible to send more than 100 invites at a time, and you can’t send out any more invitations if you have 300 pending invitations. This is clearly an effort by Facebook to cut down on spam and to push marketers onto their paid channels.
Facebook is clearly telling marketers that event invites are for social occasions only. The message clearly states that they’re only meant for “inviting people you know and think would enjoy the event.” As marketers, this means event invites are exclusively for inviting influencers you personally know and have developed relationships. If you want to invite more people, you need to fork over the cash.
3. Status Update Change
Users now have the option to choose commands while they post a status update that explain what they are “watching,” “reading,” “listening too,” “eating,” “drinking,” or “feeling.” These status updates come with their own custom icons and, when appropriate, they will also display the banner and icon of a page mentioned.
This is a pretty dramatic change that could prove extremely valuable for marketers. Now that calls to action and text are okay in the banner, if somebody mentions your page in a status update, you’re call to action will show up in the Facebook feed with a link to your page.
Your page will also be added to a section on the user’s timeline.
Yet another major push toward mobile, this change takes the social graph product mobile for the first time ever. This will make the open graph available to app developers, so you can expect to see more Facebook features integrated into various apps. It would be wise to integrate these features into your own apps if you hope to get some viral reach as a result.
The change is being powered by the new Object API, which cuts out the web server. Now you can simply create Open Graph objects without needing to host a webpage containing the Open Graph tags. An Object Browser also dramatically simplifies the process with a visual interface.
5. A New Mobile Layout for Facebook Pages
Almost half of the millions of people who access Facebook business pages do it on their mobile phone, so Facebook has tailored the pages to match how people use their phones. To make the experience more engaging for visitors, the look has been streamlined for mobile, locations and photos have been made more visible, and actions such as Like, Call, Message, and Share have been brought to the top of the pages where they are more accessible.
Pinned posts now show up closer to the top, and the interface has been changed for page owners so that they can easily switch between administrative and public views on their mobile phone.
These changes should make Facebook Pages even more relevant to local business than they were before, since mobile users are more likely to take local, rather than online, actions.
6. 30 Percent of Facebook’s Ad Revenue from Mobile
Finally, Facebook has reported that in the past quarter, Facebook’s mobile ad revenue has grown to make up 30 percent. Last quarter, the figure was just 23 percent. This has been a revenue growth from $300 million to $375 million per quarter.
It’s no surprise that mobile advertising is on the rise. Mobile users tend to interact with ads more often and spend more money than desktop users, and the ads are more relevant to local businesses.
These changes represent some major shifts toward mobile in the years ahead, and businesses should pay attention to where these trends are taking us.