NY Social Media Marketers Weigh in on #f8 Facebook Changes

Image via CrunchBase

by Lisha Arino

Users aren’t the only ones weighing in on Facebook’s new features.

After last week’s F8 conference, some NY social media marketers are predicting that the changes will affect the way they reach out to users on the site, even though the new features will only affect personal profiles (social media marketers generally use the “Pages” feature to manage brands).

Facebook has yet to announce how these changes will affect brand pages, if it all. According to an email from the site’s press contact, the company “hope[s] to make Pages more consistent with the new Timeline in the future, but we have nothing further to share at this time.”

Some analysts predict that Facebook’s “Like” button will become irrelevant, thanks to a new tool launched earlier lastweek that lets users mark which posts they want to see in their news feeds. Eventually, the site will be able to curate posts based on that information.

For marketers, this scenario has major implications.

“The ‘Like’ button is everywhere,” said Adrienne Waldo, a marketing executive at NY-based Blue Fountain Media. “That’s the main metric on Facebook right now, and if it goes away, how are marketers going to measure success?” If the button does go away, Waldo said, marketers would probably start analyzing how often users share content and their level of engagement to determine a page’s success. But that approach will bring changes too.

“I think it means that brands will have to tell a cohesive message,” she said. Because users can more actively decide which content shows up in their news feed, companies need to be more thoughtful about the information they post, she said. “It’s a big deviation from what brands are doing now,” Waldo said, explaining that many post “random stuff” on their pages. Instead, she said, brands will need to have “very high quality content” to be successful on Facebook.

But it’s still too early to see draw conclusions, said Joseph Franklyn McElroy, CEO of NY’s Corporate Performance Artists.

“People are still evaluating what the changes mean for social marketing,” he said. He pointed out that the new features could make it too complicated for some users and alienate them, he said.

However, he said that were new features that interested him, like the upcoming “read” button.

“People can click ‘Read’ while they’re reading your blog and it’ll show up on your news feed,” he said. “I think that’s going to be big for social media.”