How Your Nonprofit Can Benefit from the New Facebook - By: Therese Grohman

You may have come across some of the media buzz last week over F8, Facebook’s annual developer conference. In need of a boost in consumer confidence, Facebook overhauled many of its most important features including the user profile, applications, news feed and added a new media experience for music, video and news aficionados.

Gordon Plutsky covered the various changes in the Event 360 blog yesterday, so we wanted to spend some time discussing how these changes might impact your organization and engagement strategies on this crucial channel.
Facebook Gestures

Facebook Gestures introduces a novel way to interact with brands and causes. Instead of simply “liking” an activity or organization, you can now [verb] any [noun]. This means your supporters can show exactly how they interact with your nonprofit using actionable phrases (that you program!) such as “give,” “pledge” or “walk.” This change creates the opportunity for nonprofits to promote much more direct calls to action. And these actions, in turn, produce a cascading effect of individuals taking an action for your cause and amplifying it to their networks.

Applications

You can now watch TV, read the news and listen to music all within Facebook with its new application process, and these actions are shared in real time. Facebook’s Ticker shows exactly what movies, shows, songs or other content a user’s friends engage with, creating an entirely new type of real-time word of mouth.

For example, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said he watched the show Breaking Bad not because it had been in his recommended queue on Netflix for years, but because he saw a friend watching it in the Ticker and that “social proof” was “all he needed” to validate his decision.

Timelines

Facebook’s new Timeline profile lays out your social life like an interactive waterfall for your life. Users can choose which stories and activities they want to emphasize and can individualize their new profile in a very visual, personalize way.

If certain stories or activities, such as supporting your organization, are more meaningful than others, you now can highlight these in a more significant manner. Users who care about a cause can make it more visually prominent to their networks and engaging for visitors to their profile. You organization could create a Facebook application that prompts a variety of actions the moment a person sees it on a friend’s timeline.

Newsfeed and changes to your home page

The home page newsfeed on Facebook has become much more visual. It highlights “top stories” that you’ll find important and puts them at the top of your profile, which are designated with a blue corner.

“Light” information, like planting Farmville crops, won’t appear in the newsfeed anymore. It’ll go straight to the Ticker, the real-time section of your home page. Again, this switch highlights why it’s important for nonprofits to create quality content – people will be more likely see their friend’s activities on your page rather than your posting activity, so you need to make sure that your content is compelling enough that people want to engage with it.

It’s important to remember, however, that these changes, while important, shouldn’t overtake your social network marketing. Social communication will continue to evolve, but the main focus remains on motivating supporters to engage with and actually support your cause.

What sort of adaptations will your organization make in response to the new Facebook changes?

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