New Facebook Features Could Change How Firms do Business

With Mark Zuckerberg announcing major new Facebook features at a developer conference last week, businesses will need to seize the opportunity to maintain their competitive advantage.

First of all, music and media companies will try to exploit the ticker feature. Facebook now has a real-time ticker that will provide updates about various applications and activities. The ticker, present on the right-hand side of the page, is a lightweight feed that will not work as a news feed but will provide only the activity updates from people that the user has subscribed to in real time.

These new updates will automatically list the activities of the user on the range of applications, including those that can be used to listen to music, watch a movie, read the news and play a game.

If the user clicks on the specific item in his friend's ticker he will be directed to the particular service which could, for instance, let the user sign up for a free trial version of a music plan with Spotify.

For music subscription service companies like Deezer, which has more than 1 million paying customers in France and the UK, the integration with Facebook is a major boost to their business. When a Facebook user clicks on links of songs that his friends are playing on Deezer then he will be automatically signed up for a two-week trial with accounts that use his Facebook preferences.

Thus the new feature in Facebook will provide its users the liberty of seeing what is being read, watched and heard by their friends. In addition, without leaving the page they are on, they can share the same digital content. There will be tie-ins with services such as Clear Channel's iHeartRadio and Spotify to share music, and video contents will be provided by services such as Netflix and Hulu.

Facebook also has built partnerships with companies like Nike, Airbnb, StubHub and Foodspotting which will enable its users to share information about their various activities, such as exercising, cooking and watching TV shows.

The new sharing system would definitely help users discover music, news stories and movies which, in turn, should help businesses for finding potential new customers.