This is a guest post from Jed Singer, director of client engagement at Stuzo, a creative technology company and Preferred Marketing Developer with Pages and Apps badges.

The Facebook News Feed is becoming evermore critical to engagement on Facebook. When you design branded social solutions, they need to serve as conduits for storytelling. 100x more people are likely to see the stories that your social product or campaign pushes out than will ever actually experience the product or campaign.

This amplification through the Timeline and News Feed is inherently key to awareness and viral distribution of the brand’s message, but it’s even more important because those stories in the Timeline and News Feed are more accessible by mobile users (63 percent of Facebook users) than the solution, itself, today. This focus on the “story” can mean success or failure of the program as it relates to actual business outcomes — the metrics that matter.

There are also other ways to have consumers effectively story-tell through a branded social experience: Rich Media News Feed Experiences. This is an HTML5 experience on mobile and a Flash media unit that is the experience within a promoted page post, or pushed out of a custom experience on Facebook (by either a user or a page). Both can be activated and engaged with directly within the News Feed.

Even into Q2 of 2013, these are rare for brands, but they are extremely effective at engaging users. Some, like Dunkin Donuts, Rovio, and Lexus have leveraged such units in their social repertoire. At Stuzo, we make sure that clients are intimately aware of the possibilities; one of our most successful Rich News Feed Experiences was for People’s Choice Awards this past season, which enabled fans to explore all of the award categories and vote for their favorite nominee. This gives users the full voting functionality in-stream and exposes them to the main business metric for the People’s Choice Awards — votes — without having to leave their News Feed browsing experience.
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Facebook has started to roll out support for emoji in all posts and comments on desktop and mobile, a company spokesperson tells us.

Previously, emoji — a standardized set of emoticons and picture characters – were available for Facebook Messenger, but not within status updates, comments or other posts. Facebook started offering some chat emoticons in comments on desktop last year, but this wasn’t the full emoji set. Now, users have more flexibility in sharing smileys and other icons across Facebook, whether it’s a check-in, photo caption, group post or some other message or comment.

The social network has made a number of moves recently to bring more ways for users to express themselves through small pictures. There are the new structured status updates where users can share what they’re feeling, eating, drinking, watching, reading or listening to. And the new stickers for mobile messages.

These features, along with emoji, help users communicate in new ways or say things that might be difficult otherwise. They can also add a bit more fun into the service, which at points has been seen as a cold or sterile platform compared to the flash and flexibility of other social networks. When Facebook released the Poke app, which was sillier than its typically utilitarian features, we wondered if it was a sign of more to come. So far this year it seems that Facebook is lightening up and giving users new options that are popular in other apps.

The latest emoji support for posts and comments was built at a Facebook hackathon last week and began rolling out to users on Tuesday. To create emoji characters, a user must enable the emoji keyboard on their phone and in their web browser. For example, ShowMeEmoji is a useful extension for Chrome users.

Facebook today announced that it is opening desktop News Feed inventory to more Facebook Exchange partners.

This will allow businesses to retarget Facebook users who visited their websites with Page Post Link ads in the News Feed, instead of with small ads in the right hand column. News Feed ads typically have much higher clickthrough rates than sidebar ads. Facebook had been testing this with a few demand side platforms (DSPs) Nanigans, Mediamath and Tellapart since late March and said the test was successful.

Now all “Qualified DSPs” have beta access and can create News Feed-based FBX campaigns for their customers. FBX retargeting ads are still not eligible for mobile, however.

The ads will appear in the News Feed the same as any other page post ad or Promoted Post bought through Facebook’s internal platform. Users will not be able to differentiate if the ads were purchased through the FBX or Facebook’s internal platform. Like previous FBX ads, Facebook’s format places a number of restrictions on creative, where advertisers might be used to more dynamic rich media ads on other exchanges. However, the new format introduces options for users to Like, share or comment on an ad, whereas previously users could only click on the ad and be taken to a third-party site.

Because this ad type uses Page Post Link ads, businesses can use “unpublished posts” to test and optimize different creative options. However, realtime dynamic creative is not available for this format. An example Page Post Link ad is below.

Facebook is testing a new way to encourage users to buy gifts for their friends by including a call to action within the comments section of a post.

SocialFresh CEO Jason Keath shared the example below, blurred for privacy, which says “Surprise Ty with a gift.” This is a different take on the “give a gift” button that some users had been seeing in their News Feed next to posts where their friends had shared good news. Now, instead of appearing consistently, the prompt only appears after a user has Liked the post or commented on it.

Another recently added feature is the Give Gift button in the hovercard that appears when users mouse over a friend’s name.

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Facebook has added a new icon to News Feed posts to indicate whether the user is available to chat.

If a user is online, a green dot will appear next to their name along with their post. Users can click the green dot to open up a chat window and start a conversation. This could encourage users to start private messages with friends after they see one of their posts in the feed.

For now the feature applies to News Feed posts but not those on a user’s Timeline.

Facebook is putting increasing emphasis on its chat and messaging system. The new mobile Chat Heads feature in Facebook Home and Messenger makes it easier for users to read and respond to messages even when they’re in the middle of other tasks on their phone. This latest desktop feature also deeper integrates chat into another popular activity: browsing News Feed.

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Wildfire, the social media marketing platform owned by Google, announced Tuesday that it is shutting down its self-serve Promotion Builder product.

The company will instead offer promotions solely as part of its Social Marketing Suite for enterprise clients. Basic, Standard and Premium promotions will be retired June 30. Promotions data will be available for export up until July 31.

The Social Marketing Suite covers ad buying, page management, conversation monitoring and analytics, in addition to promotion development. Previously, anyone could visit Wildfire’s site, sign up for an account and start creating and running social promotions, such as sweepstakes, coupon offers or user-generated content contests. Now, Wildfire doesn’t offer any pricing information on its site and asks potential customers to contact the company directly.

Smaller brands and businesses could look to alternatives like Offerpop, North Social or Heyo, which give marketers a range of tools for running social promotions and creating other custom experiences across social, mobile and web properties, but without the cost and commitment of an enterprise contract.

Forrester assesses social relationship platforms

Forrester Research released a report Tuesday evaluating eight top social relationship platforms in terms of their current offering, strategy and market presence. Shoutlet received the highest score for current offering and Spredfast had the top score for strategy. Salesforce.com’s Buddy Media led in market presence.

Forrester looked at Adobe, Hearsay Social, Salesforce.com’s Buddy Media, Shoutlet, Socialwave, Spredfast, Sprinklr and Syncapse, rating each on 49 criteria. Overall, the study found no clear leaders in the space, but most were “strong performers.” Socialware and Syncapse were in the lower tier of “contenders.”

Shoutlet led the current offering category largely because of its comprehensive feature set and easy onboarding. Spredfast excelled in strategy because of its highly satisfied customer base, which found its measurement and reporting capabilities to be the strongest of all platforms.

The full report, “The Forrester Wave™: Social Relationship Platforms, Q2 2013,” is available for purchase here.

ShopIgniter updates rich media advertising platform

Social marketing and commerce company ShopIgniter this week announced an update to its Igniter platform, which helps companies create rich media posts on Facebook, as well as its entry into the paid media management space.

The combination gives brands an end-to-end solution for running interactive advertisements in the Facebook News Feed. For instance, a company could show off a new product line with a video and image gallery that link to the retailer’s website or includes an entry form for a related sweepstakes. ShopIgniter provides templates, but experiences and design are fully customizable.

Instead of hosting these experiences in page tab applications that users hardly visit, ShopIgniter presents them in-stream so users can interact with and share the posts directly from News Feed. ShopIgniter says rich media posts generate more engagement and less negative feedback than traditional posts.

ShopIgniter now has a small media buying team to manage campaigns for clients. Sr. Director of Strategy Justin Kistner, who recently joined the company after leading product at Spruce Media, says he’s bringing on more media buyers and a product team is in the works but for now the company is mostly advising clients on how to apply paid media to their rich media posts created with ShopIgniter.

Facebook is testing a new link format with larger photos and no headline or summary. Another test looks the same as other link posts, but includes a small icon in the bottom right corner to indicate which site the link is to.

With the first test, an image takes up the full width of News Feed, appearing as large as photo posts but being clickable to a third-party website. Previously, if a person or page wanted to share a full-size image along with a link, they had to make a photo post and put the link in the caption. When users click a photo, it opens the image in lightbox view. Users have to click the link separately. With the test as seen below, users can click the large image and be taken to the site. However, the headline and summary for the article or webpage are not visible.

In another test, Facebook has begun showing domain-specific icons along with links that are shared in the new desktop News Feed. The icons, which appear in the bottom right corner of a post, help make links more noticeable in the feed.

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Facebook today announced updates for its iOS apps, which bring new messaging features to iPhone and the new News Feed design to both the iPad and iPhone.

Facebook will begin offering “stickers,” which are larger emoji that are popular in Asian messaging apps like Line, KakaoTalk and WeChat. Stickers are a key source of revenue for these and other third-party apps. Facebook announced a “sticker store,” but for now, the stickers are free to download.

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Some Facebook users are seeing a banner above their News Feed encouraging them to update their “acquaintances” list so certain friends appear less frequently in their feed.

The acquaintances list launched along with “close friends” and Smart Lists in 2011. Users can add people to the acquaintances list to limit the amount and type of updates they see from them. Users can also apply this list to improve their privacy settings and prevent certain photos or posts, for instance, from being visible to friends they aren’t as close to. Over the past year we’ve seen Facebook try different ways to get users to update this list, but the prompt reader Matt Navarra saw on his homepage late last week is the most prominent.

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With the new Timeline, Facebook users can share richer stories about the books, movies, TV shows and music in their lives.

The social network is beginning to get to the vision it set out at the expansion of Open Graph in 2011. Users don’t have to Like a book, they can read it. Similarly, they can watch a movie or listen to an artist. The latest profile redesign helps users list what they’ve read, watched or listened to, but also what they want to read, watch and listen to.

Over the past few weeks we’ve seen a number of new ways Facebook is helping users fill out these sections of their About page, including through desktop News Feed stories and Timeline modules. Now we’ve seen options on mobile, too. In the past, it hasn’t been very easy for users to update their profiles from mobile besides Liking things in the feed. Now, it’s easier to add a range of new information just by browsing News Feed and tapping a few buttons.

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