It started with Sponsored Stories early last year and now, Facebook continues to encourage user activity and promoted content with the recently announced new Timeline apps. These Timeline apps allow users to broadcast their daily activities, such as “cooking,” “hiking,” and “knitting,” moving beyond the traditional “like,” “read,” “watch” and “listen” buttons. These actions are chronicled through the use of specific applications connected to Facebook; you may have already seen many posts on your news feed from connected apps such as Spotify and The Washington Post, for example.
In January, Facebook announced the expansion and enhancement of action-based interactions and added 60 more Timeline apps, with many more to be added as the new feature grows in poularity. This advancement creates a new way for users to interact with apps, content and brands. Think of actions as creating a virtual, public diary chronicling everything you do throughout the day and “expressing who you are; a runner, foodie, traveler, music fan, movie buff and more” (Facebook.com).
According to TechCrunch, each app will have anywhere between two to ten verbs, which will then show up in Ticker (a feature of the Timeline profile). At the end of each month, all personal activities will be summed up on your timeline in the format of a visual graph. An article on Fast Company outlines the idea behind actions and Timeline apps:
Let’s say you listen to a particular song on Spotify. That action, “listened to a song,” gets passed back to Facebook (assuming you’ve given Spotify approval to do so). The action gets listed in your friends’ Tickers, where all their friends’ actions inside Facebook (like when they Like a page or comment on a picture) gets displayed in real-time. The action also gets listed on your Timeline as a permanent part of your history. (Though you can choose not to have that listed, or limit the people to whom it gets displayed.)
VentureBeat describes actions as “the holy grail of semantic data,” defining relation types between people, objects, content, places, businesses and more. Carl Sjogreen of the Facebook product team states,
Ideally, any app you find meaningful will be able to connect to Facebook in a way that’s more meaningful than just clicking a ‘like’ button or automating shares from that app on your wall – and that all your stories will be told, not through a universe of apps, but universally on Facebook and with a structured context.
These new Timeline apps create an opportunity for businesses and organizations to further understand relationships between consumers and products consumed. According to an article on Forbes.com, actions and Timeline apps allow for more targeted marketing, which means businesses will need to begin harnessing beyond “likes” in order for people to demonstrate their loyalty and connection to a brand. Furthermore, the article states that for marketers, this means “new ways to target, reach and engage consumers.” Forbes.com also noted that studies show incorporating social information and connecting ads to friends’ actions on Facebook make people twice as likely to click an ad and the intent to purchase increases fourfold.
This means that people will spend more time on Facebook than they already do. Using these apps and allowing them to structurally organize your actions onto Facebook means news feeds and profiles will see a lot more traffic. Users will be more connected to Facebook as it will chronicle and track everyday actions, subsequently encouraging and allowing friends to participate in the same activities, purchases, and more. With this increased interaction on Facebook, comes more ad inventory, increased options for social ads and improved ad targeting.
Privacy is the main concern over the new Facebook Timeline apps and their actions. Many users have fear around the publicity of location apps such as RunKeeper, which uses a GPS function to map the route of your run, walk, hike, etc. Furthermore, it will take some time before Timeline apps will create a big impact on Facebook and outside developers. In order for the action features to truly launch, everyone must be on Facebook’s Timeline format, which is predicted to be mandatory very soon.
We recommend looking into Facebook Timeline apps and mapping out how it all might drive consumer awareness, participation and overall success for your business or organization. Make the transition from Facebook Pages to a Facebook Timeline so you are ready to utilize actions in the near future and stay ahead of the curve.
Katherine Turney