What a week it was for Facebook! At its fMC event, the social network that will go for its initial public offering in the next few months, presented the Timeline for pages, new ad products and upgraded Insights which mostly were targeted towards businesses.

And apparently, the innovation efforts just keeps rolling… New reports across the web are noting that Facebook experimenting with some sort of new list for pages, planning a serious refurbishment for its Preferred Developer Consultant program and already launched its first giant logout page ad (guess who’s the advertiser).

Adding Pages To “Interest List”?

The educational social media marketing blog, Social Fresh, has noticed that for a short while when visiting a Facebook page and opening its preferences dropdown button, a new option has been added right at the top- “Add to interests Lists”. Impress by yourself- This is how it appeared on Burberry Facebook page and watch what happened where clicking on this option:

Note what it says when clicking on the “Add to interests Lists” option: “Start an interest list to special news feed of related posts.” What does it mean exactly? Until Facebook will officially announce anything, we can only guess what is this new option designated for.

My guess is that Facebook trying to organize the user’s News Feed better. The guys at the social network company probably came to the conclusion that following to many pages can cause an overload on the News Feed. It conflicts with Facebook goals which are obviously to INCREASE the users-pages engagement and not to DECREASE it.

So therefore, it might be seeking for new ways to subtract some of the postings burden. In order to do so, they may create a whole new News Feed (under the “Interest List”) which is dedicated only for pages. Again, this is just my guess. Whatever it is, nice catch Social Fresh!

Planning Makeover For The Preferred Developer Consultant (PDC) Program

Josh Constine from TechCrunch has reported yesterday that Facebook intends to conduct a serious makeover for its PDC program which will mainly revolve the following four fields- Pages management, ads API, Insights, and custom apps development. The reason for the major planned upgrade is to allure more businesses for the program and consequently, to generate more revenue for Facebook:

• Pages Management- Better page appearance, posting and marketing will encourage brands to spend more.
• Ads API- Do I really needs to explain why improved ads API increases ad spending?
• Insights- More effective measuring and targeting leads to more confidence from businesses which leads to… more ad spending.
• Custom Apps Development- Better apps attracts more users to use them and more users always means more money.

Josh Constine already proved several times in the past that he has reliable inside sources. He reports that Facebook disclosed this refurbishment to few “trusted partners”. I guess they aren’t so trusted after all…

Facebook’s First Giant Logout Page Ad

Facebook just introduced the new logout page ad couple of days ago and already it has its first advertiser. Initially revealed by Raj Singh from myJoblinx and published on TechCrunch, Facebook confirmed that Microsoft is first to advertise in the logout page with a giant Bing ad.

The logout page Bing-ad is essentially highlighting Bing search box with an attractive image on the background where Bing’s Facebook page is also featured below. Whenever conducting a search, the results opens up in a new window. Here’s a screenshot: