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Facebook is always making minor tweaks to its platform to enhance users’ experience and last week introduced three functionality changes that may impact the way both you and your favorite brands use the social network.

View Shares on Your Profile or Fan Page

Facebook users can now view shares from public-facing status updates on their page, friend’s pages, or fan pages. It’s important to note that you can only view who shares a status update if the post was shared publicly by a user or by one of your friends.

Now you can easily see which of your friends shared your public updates, but how will this affect your favorite brand?

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Brands with longer sales cycles have grappled with how to leverage social media to maintain meaningful engagement with potential customers. The purchasing decision process for a residential solar energy system is squarely in this dilemma. Home solar installations have become a more understood product in recent months, and solar industry experts such as Ucilia Wang of Forbes have noted that solar manufacturers are making consumer marketing a priority as consumers become more interested in solar as a viable option for their home.

For most homeowners, the considerations around whether or not to buy a solar system can be daunting. From understanding a timeline for ROI, to appearance, to maintenance, the list of factors to weigh when considering a solar energy installation can be intimidating.With this in mind, SunPower has just launched the Solar Discovery Game as a means to help homeowners better understand the history of solar, mechanics behind the technology as well as the various opportunities a home installation can provide.

The Solar Discovery Game is hosted on Facebook as a completely custom built game, using a SunPower branded Google Maps interface to present solar trivia questions designed to promote solar education and energy awareness. The game supports ongoing engagement by allowing players to earn “badges” for unlocking achievements. These badges can be published to Facebook friends via wall posts as they progress throughout the experience. The game also leverages Facebook Connect to show a custom leaderboard of just your Facebook friends to drive some friendly competition. Each week, SunPower will add new questions to answer, many of which are based on common misconceptions found in solar conversations online that have surfaced over the last year.

By playing, you can win the grand prize of a complete SunPower solar energy system worth up to $25,000 and will be entered to win more than 60 featured prizes, including plane tickets, video cameras, gift cards, event tickets, SunPower gear, and much more! In addition to offering prizes, we are collaborating with SunPower partners to develop unique questions, which will be placed on the map during the contest.

Come play the Solar Discovery Game, and let us know what you think! The game will run throughout the summer, from June 21 to September 14.We’re also looking for you to get involved! Tell us what questions you’d like to see in the game. Also, we’re still accepting partners if you’d like to promote your sustainability efforts, feel free to get in touch. Happy exploring!

Disclosure: SunPower is an Ogilvy client.

A picture is worth a thousand words, right? What about a Facebook picture?

How much do you think a Facebook user’s photo that a brand is tagged in is worth? While a quantifiable value is not currently measurable, positive photos that fan pages are tagged in are valuable to the brand as they provide a strong word-of-mouth recommendation (without the words, of course).

Brands will see themselves and their products tagged in more and more photos on their Facebook fan page now since Facebook announced last week that users have the ability to tag fan pages in their photos on Facebook in the same way they can tag their friends. This new functionality creates even more of a deeper connection between the user and the brand. It makes the brand more of a friend than just a brand.

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This past week, Ogilvy PR of Washington DC had the treat of hosting a discussion with DC-based Facebook representatives Adam Connor and Andrew Noyes. Among the topics discussed was the new Facebook community page feature, which Ogilvy blogged about in April.

Facebook Community Pages 101

For those unfamiliar, a Facebook community page is a separate page that groups users around a common interest. Users opt into the page automatically when they list the interest on their profile.

For example, when I click on my interest in “yoga,” I am taken to a Facebook yoga community page. Here, I can see all of my friends who also like yoga. I learn that my friend Erin “really needs some yoga in her life,” and that my favorite yoga teacher is hosting his next rooftop yoga class at the W Hotel. I can also see status updates from people and companies who would not otherwise show up in my newsfeed: yoga studio events, a yoga apparel company’s new product, what yoga DVDs are for sale. I have a whole yoga community at my fingertips, with current and future connections… all in what appears to be an informative, authentic, non-commercial space.

4 Ways Community Pages Boost Brands

Now, there is ample opinion about why brands need to tread slowly with community pages, and how such pages are harmful to brands (see this post by our Global Managing Director, John Bell). Though I would likewise advise brands to proceed with caution, I also see some silver linings to the Facebook community pages. Here are four ways Facebook community pages can boost brands:

1) Attract new brand followers. Think of the Facebook community page as a crowded expo, with a self-selecting base of consumers who are there to see what’s new. Your brand’s page is one among the many booths competing for attention. By posting engaging updates, you can lure users to your “booth.” If users are inspired by your content, they can easily like your page, and know where to find you in the future. Bonus – this grows your online fan base at no added cost to you. In that sense, these pages are more desirable than paid-for ad space.

2) Create more authentic consumer connections. In an ideal world, brands would do the impossible and create real, face-to-face relationships with consumers. In many ways, Facebook is the next best thing to face-to-face interactions, and community pages help further target the people with whom you need to be connecting. That is, because these community pages allow consumers to find your brand based on what it represents, it creates somewhat of a more authentic brand-consumer relationship.

3) Glean Useful Consumer Intelligence. Facebook community pages can offer some useful quantitative insights on consumers. Sticking with my yoga example from earlier, let’s pretend that you are a running apparel company considering expanding into the yoga market. On the yoga community page, you can tell at a glance that there are 500,000 yoga fans, about a third of the amount of proclaimed running fans. This supports your suspicion that the yoga market may be worth your investment (and considering the 400 million+ Facebook users worldwide, this is no sample size at which to sneeze!).

4) Monitor What People Are Saying About Your Brand. By clicking on a community page, you can also monitor what kinds of conversations are occurring around your brand outside of your page… for better or for worse. This can help you learn qualitative information you might not easily find elsewhere about your potential consumers.

Clearly this list is not comprehensive and omits the glaring pitfalls… like the loss of brand control on user-generated brand pages. Merely, I aim to offer an optimistic alternative to some of the fears surrounding the new feature.

What are your thoughts on the new Facebook community pages? We would love to hear your opinion in the comments below.

As a follow up to our recent webinar, Facebook Bootcamp for PR, you’ll see five blog posts in the coming weeks exploring the five trends set out in our presentation. This installment looks at the quickly evolving role of Facebook Connect and reviews how brands can use this open ID to enhance their Facebook presence and expand other social media programs. continue reading