Three big items were announced this week from Facebook, bringing further opportunities for businesses.

1) Timelines for brand pages

With Timelines added to new brand pages a whole new world is open to exposing audiences and fans to your brand and allows brands to be more effective at conveying their identity on Facebook’s platform.

When you visit a brand Page in Timeline layout, the experience becomes more personal. A prominently displayed section on the landing page shows how many of your friends like the brand, as well as your friends’ public mentions of related topics.

“The goal is to make Pages more engaging and more social,” said Gokul Rajaram, Facebook’s product director for ads.

Page administrators have new options at their fingers too. An admin panel hides or expands on command, meaning you don’t have to navigate to a separate page to make changes, updates or improvements. The panel includes notifications of activity on your Page and chart-based performance data. Best of all, you can now respond directly to private messages without added hassles or obstacles, a feature also directly accessible from the admin panel. – Sam Laird, Mashable

2) Real-time Insights and other new metrics

Pages Insights now shows your last 500 posts (going back to last July) and tallies the total number of engaged users, People Talking About it and virality. The latter measures the percentage of users who commented on the post, though sentiment isn’t taken into account. - Todd Wasserman, Mashable

For marketers, this is a new way to understand how competitors are performing on Facebook. Businesses can use that information to establish benchmarks for their own efforts. Most marketers have little to compare their Facebook growth and engagement to. For a long time, the only way to know how companies were doing on the social network was to look at total Likes. This became a skewed metric as more pages began to buy fans and launch programs that inflated their numbers but didn’t result in lasting engagement. With more public insights, it will be harder for companies to appear more successful than they truly are. – Brendan Irvine-Broque, Inside Facebook

3) New ad formats and applications

An article on The Australian said Facebook has invited marketers and journalists to New York to discuss new, potentially lucrative advertising opportunities designed to lure its 845 million-strong user base.

It is expected Facebook will try to integrate ads into people’s experience, so that friends’ posts about brands are showing up alongside their news links and puppy photos.

“Facebook is making serious money from ads right now, but they are not making serious money from major brand advertisers, and that’s where the ad money is,” said Rebecca Lieb, an analyst with the Altimeter Group.

On Mashable, Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst with eMarketer, told Bloomberg that Facebook still has to win over much of Corporate America. “It really comes down to brand advertisers,” she said. “They just need to do a better job of convincing the big advertisers that ads are effective and that they perform.”

Additionally, an article in Internet Retailer mentioned that the social network announced it is adding its Sponsored Stories ad format to Facebook’s mobile application and also adding those types of ads to the Facebook log-out screen. Sponsored Stories enable advertisers to highlight posts or actions, such as when a consumer’s Facebook friend Likes a product, checks into a store, plays a game or uses a Facebook application. The move marks the first time mobile users will see ads on the social network.

Facebook is also adding back the free Offers program, which enables merchants to offer discounts via their Facebook pages.

Consumers will initially see about one Sponsored Story a day, Facebook says. “We want to make sure that over time the marketing messages are as good as the content that you see from your friends and family,” said Caroline Everson, vice president, global marketing solutions.

In an era when people spend more than half of their waking hours consuming media, the content on your website has never been more important. And likewise, with the vast amount of redundant or otherwise useless information that populates much of the Internet, having a well maintained and well-sourced website has never been more valuable.

Is your site findable?

Content is the key for findable and authoritative websites. It also helps build your brand by injecting both a manageable personality and a point of view into your business.

Regardless of how many keywords you upload to your Adwords account or how much time and money you spend on delivering your ads to prospective customer’s eyes, you’re missing a significant segment of the market if you don’t have keyword-rich, focused and fresh content on your website. Also consider that your “best” ads may not even be showing due to a perceived lack of relevancy to what’s on the destination web page.

What the newspaper industry’s woes have shown us is that the democratization of information is expanding daily. In order to capitalize on this fact, everyone from non-profit organizations to publicly owned companies should be turning their websites into information sources, not simply glorified advertisements or electronic storefronts.

The benefits of content

The first benefit to turning your website into an information source includes increased organic traffic. The more quality information you have on your site, the more there is for browsers to connect with in web searches. One of the best parts of organic traffic is that it’s free, while online advertising can cost a significant amount of money to produce a beneficial ROI. Also, good quality content can produce targeted organic traffic and ROI long after its creation, unlike paid mediums.

Coinciding with your content creation should be an intensive marketing effort to increase your content’s visibility. This includes link building, networking with industry related blogs and news sites, actively participating in social media websites and posting to message boards and forums. Still, first and foremost, regular content production is the key.

Second, you’ll establish your business as a reputable source for the latest news and information about the product or service you provide – preferably before someone else does.

Finally, you’ll show search engines that your site is worthwhile to Internet surfers, which will ultimately increase your website’s credibility and search ranking.

While written content is arguably the most important part of your overall content strategy, multi-media content including videos, graphics, polls and the like, all combine to create a complete content package.

Once you have a content strategy nailed down – maybe you’ve even created an editorial calendar – you need to identify your audience. Who are you writing for? As tempting as it may be, you’re not just writing about your company, product or service. You’re writing for the people you hope to turn into customers. What do they want to know?

With all that in mind, go forth and start producing that content! And remember, the existing information on your site continuously needs to be optimized with updated keyword research and competitive analysis. Keeping your website on the cutting edge of web searches is a never ending process.

We can help you create a viable content and online strategy, give us a buzz.

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