Brand Republic Sept. 22nd, 2011

On September 22nd Facebook held it’s annual f8 Developer Conference in San Francisco, revealing new plans to expand its social media sharing breadth. New additions such as the Timeline profile, buttons like ‘Read,’ ‘Watched,’ ‘Listened,’ and eventually ‘Want’ (a function of e-commerce), and new partners such as Spotify, the Guardian, Artfinder, and many more are making Facebook truly the one stop hub for media sharing. For example:

• By downloading the Spotify App onto your Facebook, friends and family will be able to see directly on your wall what you’re listening to, what you like, and be able to share that music for free
• By clicking ‘Listened,’ whatever song(s) you choose will pop-up on your wall similar to the ‘Like’ button. This function is called Open Graph and creates a dialogue between you and your song
• On your timeline you will see the song, as well as a history of all the songs you’ve ever ‘Listened’ to, documented and archived in an easy-to-navigate fashion

New features such as Subscribe (a Twitter knock-off) and, yet another Wall facelift have already been implemented (notice the Ticker on the right hand side of the page?). But what does this all mean?

• Timeline encourages people to ‘fill in the gaps,’ and provide as much data about personal history, work experience, current projects, et.
• This data will be available for 3rd party researchers to even further define their target audience and reach them through Facebook ad space
• Brand Pages and updates will become less significant and more noisy as people use Facebook to share things which are entertaining, not business related

Facebook, the start of social media, is creating additional media channels to encompass sharing on a much larger scale. It is enhancing it’s digital value, creating new pricing models especially for music, and optimizing the process for which all of this sharing is accomplished.

Filed under: Social Media Marketing