360DigitalInfluence

What is “Facebook Stories”?

This July, Facebook announced that it had passed the 500 million user milestone. Along with this announcement, Facebook also rolled out a new application, “Facebook Stories,” to celebrate its achievement.  As the largest social network in the world, stories of how people are interacting with others on Facebook happen every day. However, these stories usually end up only on Facebook Status Updates and News Feed, where limited users (i.e.friends) can access.

By launching Facebook Stories, users are able to share their unique stories in a collective environment, and all users can read these stories searchable by location or theme. Themes cover a variety of topics such as education, relationships, reunions, love etc. and after reading a couple stories, I would add some are quite inspiring and mind-opening. While various people use Facebook to keep in touch with old friends, others have clearly allowed Facebook to become a part of their lives.

How Brands use Facebook Stories Tab

In addition to the Facebook Stories site, Facebook is currently partnering with 31 fan pages, which associates a certain brand to many of the Facebook Stories tabs. LIVESTRONG, for instance, highlights health-related stories on its Facebook fan page; The Knot, a leading wedding service company, highlights Facebook users’ love stories. While these stories do not relate to the brand itself, they do represent a philosophy behind it, or the mission of its particular cause. Through these stories, content on fan pages become more engaging and fans are more likely to spend more time thinking about or visiting the brand. At the same time, these Facebook Stories allows the brand to see a glimpse of what stories people like to share. In turn, the brand may tailor its engagement plan to cross promote its page and Facebook Stories.

Since Facebook Stories is now available to any developer, I believe that more brand pages will link up with this new application to establish greater consumer engagement and brand awareness.

So, what is your story?

Facebook often has the luxury of refining ideas that have been around a while and that is what I predict for payments over Facebook. People are already comfortable with entering their credit card info on websites so payments on Facebook won’t seem like a huge leap; here I will review a few of the most recent trends in currency and the opportunities for brands.

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I see posts on lots of social media blogs with weekly updates on the most successful Facebook Pages or types of Facebook Pages (example below) and they always include the same metric: number of fans (now called “Connections”). Likely this is because that number is the most public metric to compare but a little digging into the engagement on a Page came tell you a lot about its success.

You would never measure the success of a retailer by how many people entered the store or the success of a services company by how many people visit the website so why do people get to lazy with Facebook? Here are the metrics that really matter in a successful strategy and while fan count is one of them it may not be your most important. continue reading

When I first read about a new work-around to add Google Analytics to Facebook Pages I was set to geek out and asked recent FBML experts Mike Mangi and Jay Marrow to help me set it up.  I added it to our 360 DI Facebook Page and let it run for about five days.

Verdict: Nice to have but not need to have. Not worth the trouble for basic Pages but an easy lift to add to a custom Tab for campaign tracking. Details after the jump. continue reading