Big changes at Facebook and Twitter

There were a couple of big changes at Twitter & Facebook last week that have been getting a lot of coverage so let's take a look at the implications.

First up, Facebook launched a ‘Subscribe’ button for websites, which basically allows visitors to your site to add your social updates to their Facebook feed without going anywhere near Facebook, or having to seek out a profile page or author individually.

So let’s say you're interested in what the editor of Techcrunch has to say, then you can click subscribe on one of his articles http://on.fb.me/to74OU (screengrab) and straight away you’ll start to see his content in your Facebook feed.

So what does that mean for brands?

Primarily, it builds on the success that the Open Graph has had on increasing traffic to sites (Yahoo enjoying a 600% traffic increase to its News site), giving content owners another opportunity to piggy back on the earned media impressions generated by viewers just reading their content. On the downside, it is just another set of things to further clutter people’s newsfeeds, so let's hope that Facebook makes changes to the newsfeed allowing you to swap between your friends updates and those from brands you subscribe to (kind of like Google+ circles?).

Secondly, Twitter have begun rolling out enhanced profile pages. From a brand point of view, initially with 21 carefully selected global brands.
http://www.brandrepublic.com/news/1108578/twitter-reveals-new-look-including-brand-pages/

If you’re a Twitter user, check out this video & info on what the redesign does for you: http://fly.twitter.com/

From a brand POV, greater control is given over the content/tweets that are visible and more actual branding is possible, creating pages that are intended to be more of a destination for people interested in the brand.

This will one to watch as it develops but it's clearly a move from Twitter to take a share of brand budgets currently being invested in Facebook profiles.

Via @PeteFyfe