Facebook’s changes, announced last week, have given brands plenty to consider as they decide how and where to allocate marketing resources. Some companies, such as Microsoft, needed little time. According to Marketing Land,  it is the first advertiser to buy space on Facebook’s ”logged out” ad unit, which is only displayed to users who log out of Facebook.

What to Consider

Brands with fewer marketing resources at their disposal, though, have many new considerations to factor into their marketing budget if they move forward with everything Facebook is promoting. As it is, Facebook ad budgets have grown 109% month-over-month in Q4 2011, according to February 2012 data from Kenshoo.

A Facebook page redesign will likely be necessary and brands will want to consider the new slew of new ad tools Facebook announced.

A Comment Policy

Less obvious—but possibly just as important to brand building—will be a company’s comment policy and conversation monitoring with the new Timeline for Pages.  IT World points out that of all the changes to Timeline for Pages, companies should be most concerned about the Friend Activity.

"While it's a great feature if everyone is speaking in glowing terms about your company, negative comments have a way of bubbling to the top faster than positive ones. If a company is concerned about reputation management, it should have the option of turning off Friend Activity," it said.

At the very least, Jesse Noyes, corporate reporter for Eloqua, told the E-Commerce Times, brands should be aware they need to be even more vigilant about monitoring conversations.

"Each brand will need to determine how to respond to criticism — i.e., hide it? Delete it? Respond publicly to it?"

Cultivating the Positive

The good news is that brands that garner positive feedback can maximize those conversations in a myriad of ways, starting with Facebook’s enhanced Sponsored Stories ad format. But there are other ways as well: analysis from EdgeRank Checker found that a comment on a Facebook post containing a link results in almost 5 times the amount of clicks of that link than a like of a comparable post. It also found that for every like a post gets, its link receives on average 3.1 clicks.

Meanwhile, for every comment a post gets, it receives on average 14.7 clicks. Overall clicks per impression were found to be 0.005.