Facebook’s New Social Apps
For businesses, the most important Facebook feature is no longer the Like button but rather the new kind of social apps. We take a closer look.
Frictionless sharing? Realtime serendipity? The words that Mark Zuckerberg used at f8 to describe the new Facebook may seem like lines straight out of a science fiction novel, but these funny-sounding phrases represent some pretty revolutionary ideas. In the previous SAP.info article, “Google+ vs. Facebook: Round 2″, you read up on frictionless sharing and the rationale behind it. Here, you’ll learn about its counterpart: realtime serendipity. By that, Facebook is referring to the new kind of social apps, built on the latest version of Open Graph, and the way people will interact with them.
If you read in your Ticker, for example, that “Karen is running in Central Park on Nike+” and “Joe is listening to California Sunrise on Spotify,” the hoped-for result is that you will also go for a run on Nike+, preferably while listening to that song on Spotify. These activities will then automatically appear on your Timeline and in your friends’ Tickers and News Feeds, and the ripple effect is set in motion.
It’s all going viral
Since Facebook’s Open Graph supports an unlimited combination of verbs and nouns, the possibilities for social apps are endless. The next time you take a look at your Ticker, you might find out that: “Joe is riding a Schwinn bike to work” or “Karen is reserving a table at Café Garbo.” It’s not hard to imagine that soon the “viral” phenomenon, which used to occur mostly around YouTube videos, will now also apply to restaurants, retail products, and the other minutiae that is shared via Facebook.
That’s why realtime serendipity, i.e. social apps, is the most important new feature on Facebook for businesses. In the previous article, we stated that businesses will have to do a lot more than accumulate Likes to stand out amidst the constant stream of updates. Social apps will enablecompanies to do that.
Let’s take Nike as an example. The company created an app, Nike+ GPS, that records your pace, distance, and route – it even cheers you on throughout your run. The most important aspect of the app, however, is that it enables you to post your accomplishments on Facebook. This means that every time you – and every other user of the app – finish a run, the Nike brand is broadcast on countless Tickers and News Feeds, regardless of whether those users are Fans of Nike or not. With social apps, companies are able to reach a much wider audience than they previously could on Facebook.