Social Landscape Review: Q1 2011

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After many shifts in the social landscape during the fourth quarter, Q1 proved active but provided few monumental changes. Let’s take some time to look back at what the last three months have brought to the social media space.

January

• Facebook Deals Internationally – On the last day of January, Facebook launched deals in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK, exposing the feature to more than 114.6 million new users. For the Canada launch, a number of top Facebook brands premiered Deals nationwide, including Indigo, H&M, Dynamite, Garage, Joe Fresh, Town Shoes, and TELUS.Image may be NSFW.
  Clik here to view. Places and Deals have a symbiotic relationship, as Deals is dependent on Places, and Places is made more compelling by Deals; the greater the penetration of Deals among brands, the more active users will become with Places.
• Foursquare Ambassador Program – Late in 2010, foursquare launched a beta initiative called the Ambassador Program where super users could sign their favorite businesses up for specials using the free Merchant Platform. The response from users was enormous, and in January, foursquare expanded the Ambassador Program, opening registration to all users. Something for brands to keep in mind while they formulate their social strategy is that while Facebook Places & Deals and foursquare Venues & Specials operate similarly on the front end for users, the processes that businesses must go through to register their locations and set up consumer-facing incentives is drastically different.

February

• Facebook iFrames – In February, Facebook made a fundamental structural change when it decided to no longer support FBML, and instead move exclusively to iFrame. This change gives Facebook developers much more flexibility and the users a much more streamlined experience when engaging with custom engagements within a Facebook Page. Landing views can now be customized based on the user’s location, views can be dynamically updated based on the content that is being accessed, and flash elements can now load without activation (while any auto-play functionality is still disabled).
• Enhanced Facebook Page UI – With the shift to iFrame, Facebook also enhanced other elements of the Page front-end, while enabling a number of new features on the back-end. When visiting a Page, the tab structure was eliminated in favor of a left navigation, and while logged into Facebook as a Page administrator, users could now interact with other users and Pages as that Page that they administer. Admins can also opt to receive notifications when other users engage with their Page, and some basic Wall moderation using keyword filters was also added into the mix.
• Twitter Translation Center – Since 2009, Twitter had crowdsourced translation in one fashion or another, but in February, they launched the Translation Center, which enables users to sign up to be a translator and begin localizing immediately. While these users aren’t translating tweets, just the Twitter product itself, this streamlined process will enable Twitter to launch in more languages even more quickly than it has over the last twelve months.

March

• Revamped Foursquare Specials – With the release of foursquare v3, the entire back-end for creating and managing Specials received an overhaul. There are now different types of Specials ( in a similar vein to the four types of Facebook Deals): Flash, Friends, Swarm, and Newbie Specials join Checkin, Frequency, Loyalty, and Mayor Specials for a total of 8 distinct breeds. The creation of Specials was further streamlined, and it’s now easier than ever to get set up – and, of course, the process is still free. More compelling Specials mean more engaged users.
• Facebook Questions – At the tail end of March, Facebook took Questions out of beta, and released it to the general public, receiving a mixed reception. The feature has a very low barrier to entry – once a question pops up in your newsfeed, you simply click a radio button to answer – and Questions can become extremely viral because if I ask a Question, and you answer, the Question/Answer get published out to your social graph. Questions are also flexible in scope, in that they can be for close-ended mass polling (e.g. “Mac vs. PC?”), or for more focused, relevant analysis (e.g. “What’s the best restaurant in Center City Philadelphia?”)