New Things Coming to Facebook in 2013
During my Social Media Marketing class the other night, we talked about the new innovations coming to Facebook. The first being the concept design and the other being Graph Search.
For those who haven’t seen it yet, here’s the link to what Facebook’s layout concept is. Of course, this is a work in progress and the final layout probably won’t look like this or it will have some similar features. It reminds me a lot of Windows 8 and the Metro UI. It’s very clean and sleek. I think this kind of look would benefit business/branded pages because it’ll almost look like another website, and could even pass off as a micro site. Although, from watching the video, it seems like there are multiple pages and I have no idea how you’re going to get to all of them. Maybe by swiping? Or they’ll have different tabs for you to click on that will take you to those desired pages. I know they have the sidebar that takes you to the About Me page so maybe all of the pages like your Wall, Photos, Likes, etc will be listed there as well. The video doesn’t make it very clear where they’re actually clicking to reach these pages so I can only guess it’s through that sidebar. The cool thing is how they have the pop-up window whenever you click on photos. I think it really matches their entire thematic look and feel with the right color schemes and everything.
The one thing I don’t understand is why they’re moving things around in the beginning of the video. Maybe they’re allowing us the ability to feature certain parts of our wall as a collage and we can organize it? Otherwise, it just doesn’t make sense to start moving things around especially if Facebook is still trying to incorporate “Timeline”. Making things out of order in time doesn’t make sense. Other than that part, I think the rest of it looks pretty cool. We also saw what the New MySpace looked like as well and it seems the two social media platforms are following in each others’ footsteps because it doesn’t look much different. Take a look for yourself here: The New MySpace
Facebook is already in the midst of launching this new feature, Graph Search. It’s currently on beta and there is a waiting list involved in order to try it out. This is essentially a search engine within Facebook. You can now get more technical in your searches by inputting things like “People who like surfing” or “Places my friends have visited” and you’ll be given a list of Facebook users who have an interest in surfing and they’ll also list the names and places your friends have traveled to. It’s definitely going to take social media to an even more social level which I think is pretty awesome. You can even get real specific by saying “People who like surfing and are my friends”. That would narrow down the search to an even smaller selection of people.
On the advertising side of things, I think this will definitely help brands target specific audiences. Let’s say we’re Tide (since I’ve done Tide in my blog before), you’d probably want to find people who are athletic because you know that your brand has the power to get rid of tough stains like grass and dirt. By simply searching “People who play sports”, you’d be given a large group of people who could be your potential audience. This would definitely help with advertising on Facebook and make targeting better.