Whilst managing one of our Facebook pages, it’s been revealed to me how important it is to constantly update the content on a page in order to keep people interested.  This is standard practice on the web, if you regularly update your content you will see users returning regularly to check out what’s new.  This is especially important on something like Facebook where users have no genuine reason to visit your page other than out of curiosity.

I can see a lot of brands treating Facebook as a sort of gallery, great to put in a snapshot of their company in the hope that people will see they’re in touch with their audience.

‘People use Facebook? Quick, get on Facebook!  Yeah, that’s right we’re on Facebook.  What do we do on Facebook? Erm,  we have to do stuff?’

In my opinion, the more successful brands on Facebook treat it more as a window into their company.  Their company is constantly working, changing, doing things, their Facebook page reflects that.  Each month they have new content for their page, details of current promotions, events they’re attending, campaigns they support, competitions they’ve won.  This constantly updating content gives users a reason to keep visiting their page, and a reason to become a fan, ensuring that these changes appear in their news feed.

Facebook gives pages the option to add content through ‘Static FBML’ apps, allowing admins of the page to put any HTML or FBML (Facebook’s HTML subset) on a page.  This gives a far greater level of customisation on pages, and has allowed us to implement everything from high score tables for certain applications to mini stores on e-commerce brand pages.  By constantly rotating a selection of best selling products, users are presented with a purchasing opportunity before they even leave the comfort of their procrastination station.

Facebook being used by a business should be the same as Facebook being used by an individual.  The average user doesn’t set up a profile then abandon it, they interact with it, update it and use all it’s features.  Facebook could be a fantastic platform for businesses to interact with consumers on a two way basis, but users will be reluctant to open themselves up to interaction if they don’t expect a response, and will come away with a negative attitude if they ask questions and don’t receive a response.

I think in the future we could easily see brands using web services to relate further to their target demographic.  Starting from Facebook but moving towards services like Twitter, which is fantastic for sending out promotion information, regular blogging, flickr for photo content, the list of services is almost endless, and with aggregation services like Friend Feed pulling all of this content into one place, web marketing could start moving towards an area far more specific and interesting than the standard banner adverts.

As someone who is constantly on Facebook for work, I manage to quite easily stay on top of any requests or notifications that come my way. I had assumed that this was the case with everyone, but had recently started to notice that a lot of my friends were piling up notifications and messages due to the fact that most of the time they’re invitations to applications that someone was forced to send or messages from groups that nobody cares about.

These are very similar to the reasons why most people abandoned Myspace, the endless friend requests from fake users.

Today Facebook took a step towards keeping it’s userbase happy, adding an ‘Ignore All’ button for users that have more than 25 notifications. I can’t help but think this pretty much defeats the object of having notifications, and seems to assume that all notifications are spam, but at least it shows that they are working on something to fight this problem. I think a more relevant solution would be to block applications from forcing users to invite 20 friends before using an application instead, but we’ll see where this one goes.

Via allfacebook

Facebook application developers are continually informed that no guarantees are made as to the status of the Facebook platform so, should any errors occur, there can be no real complaints.  In fact, erros with the platform are frequent, with many developers of more complex applications fearing the weekly “Platform Update” like some kind of plague.

Yesterday, however, there seemed to be an even larger problem than normal, with most applications failing to load 9 out of 10 times.  Facebook generally carry out updates in the dead of night (US time) but for some reason yesterday, the problems continued throughout the day, with users seeing an error message instead of the application.  The problem with the error message is that it put a large amount of blame for the failure on the application developer, who, in this case, was not the one to blame.

As with any piece of beta software, you must expect there to be bugs with the Facebook platform as they strive to introduce great new features that not only improve the user experience but also make things easier for the developer (eg. the latest animations scripts).  However the Facebook platform is different from most other beta software in that there is a great deal of money on it.  Application developers are making a lot of money on advertising and selling source code, and Facebook’s own social ads are flooded with adverts for applications, netting them a fair few quid.

I don’t think yesterdays errors will mark any kind of change in the way things go in terms of Facebook app development, and in fact it may have only got me angry because I was working on the platform at the time, but I thin Facebook need to seriously review the way they update their platform if they want to keep developers on their side.