The Single biggest takeaway from the Facebook Marketing Conference
Brand marketers rejoice, Facebook just gave you an immensely powerful toolset that was introduced last week at the Fmc. By now, you probably have a grasp of their implementation of timeline, ad tools, reach generator etc. In case you haven’t, here is a summary on Techcrunch on the “Key Takeaways From The Facebook Marketing Conference.” However, amidst the product hoopla, you may have missed the thesis behind Facebook’s vision for brands.
The biggest takeaway is the shift in focus from advertising to stories. Mike Hoefflinger, Director of Global Business marketing highlighted the difference between advertising and stories in his keynote. He talked about how throughout history stories have always been fundamental to human interaction. But brands weren’t able to engage in storytelling at the necessary scale that modern business required. This bore the genesis of advertising. With Facebook’s growth to a network of 800 million people, they have fostered enough connections so that brands can evolve back to organic story telling. When you engage in story telling versus advertising, you allow your customers and advocates to tell the brand story through their unique personal lens.
You can see this vision of stories integrated into how their new advertising products work. All premium ads are built directly off of the stories published on the brand’s Timeline. These ads can appear on the desktop and mobile news feed as a natural part of the core Facebook user experience and not just a side bar. These are stories and not ads.
So how do you create compelling stories? A brand must think about the types of content that drive people to share with others. This concept was important enough to have another keynote on “what people share.” At Momentus Media, we’ve dedicated the past couple years to understanding sharing and virality and as a result have built applications that have been installed over 100 million times. From a brand perspective, the crux is understanding the intersection between what people share and your brand attributes.
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