User Engagement Opportunities: Facebook GraphRank, Open Graph & Timeline

With Timeline and ticker, Facebook introduces two new User Acquisition & Engagement points for marketers this week:

1. The ticker, which shares activity on the network with more emphasis on how recently it was published.
2. The news feed which appears to be relatively unchanged from before in that marketers need to get their users to share updates that can easily attract likes and comments for higher rank.
3. The Timeline — is probably the most difficult to break into. A third-party app would have to produce a news feed story that attracts enough engagement that it might count as the best update from a given month or year of a user’s life.

Looking strategically at the changes Facebook has made in the past few days, including the announcement of “GraphRank” at the Facebook F8 Conference today, there’re at least three practical implications for marketers trying to engage with users on Facebook moving forward:

Ticker – Low barriers to access

- but likely a lower clickthrough rate. Ticker was introduced last week and shows a live feed of user activity from across the web. Facebook vice president Mike Schroepfer said during a press question-and-answer session at the developer conference today that the company will continually to tweak the ticker for more engaging activity. So there is some filtering for engagement, but less than what would be seen on the news feed.

News Feed – High barriers to access

An item would need to have high EdgeRank (e.g. a user would see an item if the update itself attracted many likes or comments or if it was from a friend they often interact with on Facebook).>

Timeline – High barriers to access

Timeline is a new profile view that lets people see a visual history of a user’s life. To see something in Timeline, the news feed story would have to be the most engaging from a given month or year in a user’s life or they’d have to intentionally curate it into their Timeline.Or a user could add an application to their timeline, akin to what “Boxes” used to do in letting users feature applications on their profile page until it was removed last year.

Source: Inside Facebook

Update: Also be sure to read Will Timeline, Ticker, GraphRank Break Facebook Marketing? over on All Facebook.com

Facebook Timeline Introduction Video:

Post maintained by Anibal do Rosario

Related posts:

• How Facebook’s EdgeRank Works
• Facebook Facts & Figures June 2010