On Thursday night, Facebook announced that it's launched its first official Twitter app--sort of. In a post on the company blog, Facebook announced that updates to "fan pages," public profiles for celebrities, brands, organizations, and what-have-you, can now be sent out through Twitter.
"Public figures, musicians, businesses and organizations of all types who've created Facebook Pages often want to share a status update, a photo or an event with as many of their supporters as possible," the post by Facebook employee Michael Gummelt read. "Celebrities may want to share personal news or charities may want to put out calls for help to both their Facebook fans and their Twitter followers, all at the same time."
This is basically something that many blogging and publishing services already do: offer a way to automatically syndicate a short blurb and a link onto Twitter. It's a no-brainer. But Facebook and Twitter have a complicated history. Facebook attempted to acquire Twitter last year, and Twitter turned the offer down. Then, earlier this summer, Facebook did acquire FriendFeed, a social-network aggregator that failed to gain mainstream traction but pioneered many of the real-time, streaming features that are now central to both Facebook and Twitter.
Relations between the two companies still seem to be a bit shaky. Facebook continues to roll out Twitter-inspired features like a souped-up search engine, a revamped "publisher" tool that can make status updates selectively public, and soon a stripped down "Facebook Lite" site that looks quite a bit like the ultra-basic Twitter.
Much has been said about Facebook and Twitter as the two forces vying for control of the real-time social Web, but little light has been shed on just how central a role the marketing industry has. The fact that Facebook's first Twitter app is exclusively for its brand-marketing "fan pages" highlights this. In the digital marketing world, the buzzworthy place for brands to be right now is Twitter--especially since this week Twitter started to elaborate plans for the paid accounts it's going to offer to businesses by the end of the year. If Facebook is going to continue to court brands effectively, it has to offer a quick and easy way to plug into that all-important "Twitter strategy."
What's less clear is whether Facebook will let ordinary users syndicate their profile updates to Twitter. Currently, they can bring in plenty of data from elsewhere thanks to Facebook's third-party developer API. You can import a Twitter feed into Facebook status updates or use third-party clients like TweetDeck to update Twitter status and Facebook status simultaneously, but you still can't opt to publish your Facebook profile updates elsewhere.
The fan box for Coca-Cola.
(Credit: Facebook)Here's something new from Facebook: the "fan box," which is a new tool for celebrities, brands, products, companies, and other entities with Facebook "fan pages" to effectively embed their Facebook presence into their Web sites.
That means that if you go to the Web site of a participating brand, like Coca-Cola or Lance Armstrong's Livestrong nonprofit, you'll see a widget that lets you add that brand as a "fan" on Facebook, which subscribes you to its updates, as well as a feed of updates and an array of profile photos from members who have already proclaimed themselves to be fans.
Facebook is hoping that people will find the "fan box" to be extremely easy to install, so that it's a no-brainer for companies and sites that might not be quite up to speed on technical expertise.
This is a big deal as Facebook continues to expand its presence beyond its famed blue-and-white walls, and keeps pushing the message that its 200 million-plus user base is an invaluable resource for marketers--especially interesting since brand promotion is something that MySpace once had a lock on in the social-networking world. The Facebook Connect log-in product is now installed on over 10,000 sites, and one start-up executive told me Tuesday that it's boosted their user registration numbers so much that he's astonished the company doesn't charge for it.
And last month, Facebook launched a tool called the "live stream box," which embeds a stream of the social network's Twitter-like "status updates" pertaining to a given event, much like the one that CNN and MTV used for this week's memorial for the late pop legend Michael Jackson.
Facebook's all set to make a product development announcement of sorts on Wednesday in the form of what it calls an "Open Door" event featuring CEO Mark Zuckerberg and several other executives. The most notable portion of it--according to an e-mail from the company's press corps--is that it'll unveil "the next evolution of Facebook Pages."
Facebook Pages, as you may recall, are the free profiles that brands can set up to establish a presence on the social network, which now has over 175 million members worldwide. Members can sign onto the pages as "fans," much as they can add other members as friends. Brands, meanwhile, can use them to communicate with people who've added themselves as fans, embed third-party applications that they've built themselves or sourced from the thousands on Facebook's developer platform, and post promotional materials.
According to a blog post at Advertising Age, the redesigned "fan pages" will look a lot more like regular Facebook profiles, which got their own revamp last year. This means their content will be distributed on tabs, with external applications aggregated primarily on their own tab. Also, according to the AdAge post, activity from fan pages will show up more in members' news feeds, giving those brands more visibility. Beyond that, we don't have too much more information about what the announcement will entail.
What's not clear: whether there will be any kind of paid options for brands. Currently, Facebook doesn't make any additional money off of fan pages besides encouraging companies to promote them with either display ads or its more interactive Engagement Ads.
Advertising and marketing on social networks remains a touchy subject. Some companies have reported notable success, while others have experienced tepid results or even outright PR disasters.
On Tuesday, Pace University and a company called the Participatory Marketing Network put out the results of a survey that tracked the habits of consumers between the ages of 18 and 24. The results indicate that "brand pages" on social networks (other community sites like the News Corp.-owned MySpace also have similar products to Facebook's) are going to need some tweaking if they're going to be a legitimate marketing outlet.
That's because, per the survey results, while 62 percent of survey respondents said they'd seen a brand page on a social network, only 48 percent actually said they'd signed on as fans. And while 84 percent said that they notice the presence of ads on social networks, 74 percent said they click on them only "infrequently." Only 19 percent said they found social-network ads to be relevant.
"In a tough economy, many brands are looking to social networks as a way to engage customers and prospects in active dialogue, but many are still waiting for proof that increasing investment in this burgeoning 'channel' will yield measurable benefits," Participatory Marketing Network co-founder Michael Della Penna said in a release explaining the results. "While our research doesn't suggest that brands should turn away from social networks altogether, it does show that more work must be done to understand what drives participation and engagement within social networks."
There haven't been any big complaints about Facebook fan pages in general. But with Facebook's announcement on Wednesday, we're guessing that the redesign will be geared primarily toward making them more appealing to the brands and marketers who haven't warmed up to them yet. In these economic times, after all, it's all about the proven (or semi-proven) results.
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