Sponsored Stories is Facebook’s advertising solution that offers word-of-mouth at scale. Since it’s launch in early 2011, many brands have leveraged this ad type that blurs the lines between paid and earned to amplify natural word-of-mouth from their fans across their networks of friends. One of the Sponsored Stories types, Page Posts, allows brands to use paid media to increase a Page’s distribution and visibility of a Page’s posts. By promoting posts through Sponsored Page Posts, a brand can ensure that its posts are seen by more of its potential audience, as opposed to the minor 3-7.5% of a brand’s fan base that sees a page’s post (source: PageLever).
This week, Facebook implemented two significant changes to Sponsored Stories Page Posts to give advertisers more control and flexibility over the types of stories they can amplify using paid media:
1. Advertisers now have the option to promote specific “pinned” posts. Before, advertisers could only choose to promote its most recent Page posts, which made it difficult to promote a specific post. The only way was to make sure that no subsequent posts were published after the one a brand chose to promote. This made it fairly difficult to use Sponsored Stories Page Posts without putting a pause on publishing new posts. Facebook now allows advertisers to promote a specific post in addition to promoting its most recent posts. Brands now have a viable way to guarantee a certain number of likes for a specific posts, which holds implications for Pages who use milestone-based posting tactics (e.g. “If this post gets 50,000 likes, we’ll release an exclusive Facebook-only coupon!”) or for Pages that want to take a shot at breaking Facebook-related World Records (ahem, Oreo). Brands can now continue to actively post on a Page while also boosting a specific post through Sponsored Stories Page Posts.
2. Advertisers can now leverage two new types of Sponsored Stories: Sponsored Questions and Sponsored Question Votes. With the ability to promote specific posts described above, advertisers can now promote Questions posted to Pages, as well as the votes on Questions, as Sponsored Stories. Questions provide a simple way to create engagement among fans which, in turn, generates additional stories about the brand in users’ News Feeds.
To play around with the new features added to Sponsored Stories Page Posts yourself, visit facebook.com/ads/create.
Facebook just implemented an update to that allows users to share any status update created by a friend that they see in their News Feeds, placing greater emphasis on the act of story-sharing. Prior to this update, users could only share stories from the News Feed if they contained hyperlinks. As a user, sometimes the content I want to share most isn’t a link to an article my friend has shared on his wall; sometimes it’s simply a funny status update or a photo from the previous weekend’s nocturnal shenanigans. Now, whether it be a link, photo, or even a simple text status update, a user can share that story on their own wall, thus generating an additional layer of sharing. Additionally, users will be able to view the number of times a story has been shared as well as the specific shares as well, so long as both users are friends or the user has shared the story with the public.
Users, Brands, and Facebook should ultimately benefit from this new feature. Here’s why:
- For users, explicit sharing is more meaningful and compelling than implicit sharing. As apposed to implicit meta-stories told in third-person narrative, (stories about stories, e.g. “Justin Oh commented on Christopher Tuff’s status.”) in which sharing is passively inherent to certain types of activities, explicit stories in which a friend is the narrator can create greater impact and possesses greater potential to elicit interactions with those stories. I’m much more likely to like my friend’s status update that shares his friend’s status update rather than like a story about my friend who liked his friend’s status update told to me in third-person by Facebook.
- Brands have more opportunities to become the center of conversation. I can’t think of how many times the Skittles Facebook page has been the topic of conversation with a friend. Until now, there hasn’t been a seamless way to share their hilarious status updates directly from the News Feed. Brands that create engaging content for the News Feed will now have the ability to have more of their content shared by fans to their friends. This notion of leveraging current fans to reach friends of fans isn’t anything new and definitely seems to be the direction Facebook keeps focusing on. Conversely, for brands who aren’t producing engaging News Feed content, this change simply signifies more barriers to reaching their fans (as well as friends of fans). As users interact with more friends and brands that they increase its affinity score within EdgeRank by engaging with other users and brands.
Think about how much the Internet Explorer brand has devolved. Think about what Internet Explorer meant to you 15 years ago, during the mid 90s, when you first began surveying the vast terrain of the internet, excavating treasures such as blinking gifs or scrolling marquees. Back then, the Internet was a giant landfill of random content—scattered, sporadic, and full of wonderful discoveries—and the term Internet Explorer actually elicited the notion of exploration.
Now, exploration on the internet is passé. There is simply too much content on the web that exploration doesn’t make sense; it would simply be an aimless odyssey. You don’t just go out there and explore the world wide web. Why? Because it is the WORLD WIDE WEB. There is simply too much noise and clutter to purposefully have a meaningful experience. We no longer live in the world of digital exploration. With the connections we form through social networks and with social sharing becoming embedded into browsing experiences, we’ve transitioned into an age of curated discovery, in which connections, interests, and behaviors act as content filters.
It’s funny to reflect upon how much my personal perception of Internet Explorer has changed in the past decade. What once was the interface through which I, in the truest sense of the word, explored the world wide web now acts as a reminder of how primitive and archaic the web experience used to be. I can’t remember the last time I used Internet Explorer. I do, however, know for sure that I’ll never use it again in the future, and that simply shows me how indefinite and indeterminate a brand’s perceptions are.
Facebook seems to be making a lot of tweaks to its News Feed and EdgeRank as of late. In addition to topic grouping, Facebook has been tinkering with EdgeRank to try to give brands more prominence in the News Feed. Many Page admins I’ve spoken to are mentioning an increase in impressions as of late, and many users are saying they’re seeing a lot more brands in their News Feed than they typically see. Although it’s only anecdotal evidence, it’s clear that Facebook is up to something to help out brands. In addition to this anecdotal evidence, there is another change Facebook is making that signifies its emphasis on helping out brands: Facebook has removed the ability for users to unlike a page or unsubscribe from within the News Feed. Traditionally, users were given several options they could take to punish a brand publishing uninteresting content: unliking the page, hiding all posts from the page (unsbuscribing), or hiding the post.
Facebook has now virtually revoked all actions a user can take against a brand from within the News Feed. Now, the only action a user can take is to hide a single piece of content.
To me, these recent actions by Facebook tell two stories:
- Most brands fail at News Feed Optimization. They simply don’t get getting what types of content resonate with their fans. Why else would Facebook remove such simple ways to squelch annoying brands filling up our News Feeds with noise? Brands have to battle against their fans’ friends as well as other brands in order to appear in the News Feed, and they’re losing badly. Enter Facebook’s tweaks to make sure that brands at least appear on the News Feed, even if those impressions hardly result in a like or a comment.
- Facebook owns our social graph, and they know it. Facebook has become such an integral part of our social constructs that even if they make changes that negatively impacts the user experience—such as tweaking their News Feed to become more brand-friendly—people will ultimately still continue to use Facebook. Who cares if users’ News Feeds ends up getting cluttered with annoying updates from brands who have no idea how to be successful on Facebook? Perhaps Facebook is thinking that brands will eventually learn how to engage their fans, and until then, they should keep giving brands a chance by making it harder for fans to unsubscribe and unlike the page.
