As Facebook evolves, it is becoming an encyclopedia of user actions: the songs your friends are listening to on Spotify, a friend’s status update from their vacation, or an article shared from a website like KISSmetrics. These activities are stored in Open Graph as stories, which, when grouped together, provide detailed historical records of a user’s interests, hobbies, and relationships. The user insights available through Open Graph make it a powerful tool for effectively reaching consumers.
Five years from now, Graph Search will have won the search war. Not because it’s going to have better algorithms than Google, or have better reviews than Yelp or Foursquare; but because unlike those services Facebook is a platform and not a provider. The future value of Graph Search is only going to be as strong as the providers that utilize Open Graph.
In order to fully leverage all that Facebook has to offer, brands need to be ready to adopt a portfolio approach to their Facebook strategy. A portfolio-based approach to Facebook advertising means creating a strategy that integrates all of the advantages News Feed and Open Graph provide in order to drive awareness, engagement, Fan acquisition, and direct response/purchases.
Facebook’s announcement of their News Feed redesign yesterday represents an important milestone in their product evolution and headlines a major shift in social, as user experiences have become decidedly more visual and mobile-centric. Pinterest and Instagram have been the poster children of this trend, and Facebook recently declared themselves a mobile-first company with over 680 million monthly active users accessing the platform via mobile devices.
Do you want CPCs that are one-third your current cost? How about a 4X increase in CTR? Of course you do! These are just a few of the benefits we found during our early tests of Open Graph Sponsored Stories (OGSS). So with such great potential returns, why isn’t everyone running Open Graph Sponsored Stories (more importantly, why aren’t you)?