What Facebook Might Announce At fMC Tomorrow

Facebook and some of its biggest advertisers will gather tomorrow in New York City for the first fMC — Facebook’s conference for marketers. COO Sheryl Sandberg is one of several heavy-hitters from inside the company that will be speaking, and other guests from outside Facebook should be involved, as well.

The event will include a keynote presentation and breakout sessions, and Facebook is expected to make several ad- and marketing-related announcements. Here’s a look at what Facebook might reveal at fMC.

Timeline For Brands

Facebook first announced Timeline last September at its F8 conference, and then launched it for non-business users in December.

Brands are still waiting for Timeline, but probably not for much longer. Ad Age reported earlier this month that Timeline for brands will be announced at fMC, but will be available at first only to “a handful of partners” before being rolled out in stages to others.

New Premium Ad Products

As we reported last week, Facebook is prepping the launch of several new premium ad types at fMC. One advertiser leaked a Facebook slide deck to GigaOM that included some of Facebook’s internal expectations for how the new ads will perform.

Several current ad formats will reportedly be retired. The key idea behind the new ad formats is “Anything you can do on your Page, you can do in ads.”

Ads On Mobile

When Facebook filed its S-1 document on February 1st, the company revealed that it has a whopping 425 million active monthly users on mobile devices. But it also stated the obvious: There are no ads being shown to that enormous audience:

“We currently do not show ads or directly generate any meaningful revenue from users accessing Facebook through our mobile products.”

The S-1 went on to say that Facebook knows it has “monetization opportunities” via mobile. The question isn’t if Facebook will find a way to push ads into its mobile products, but when. With the company gearing up for its IPO, that could happen sooner rather than later. If it is announced tomorrow, this will be the big news of the day.

Real-Time Insights

Facebook Insights has been suffering of late through slow updates (think 3-4 days, rather than the normal 48 hours). There’s speculation that it’s due to the impending shift to real-time stats.

Immediately actionable analytics would be welcomed by many advertisers, particularly larger companies with the human and financial resources to react and adjust quickly to how their advertising is performing.

There’s a session on the fMC agenda called “Turning Insights Into Engagement,” but as TechCrunch speculates, the product itself may or may not be revealed during the event.

Changes To Ad Sizes

Facebook advertisers are currently allowed up to 135 characters, but All Facebook reported earlier this month that Facebook is already telling some advertisers that the limit will shrink to 90 characters. Speculation is that the announcement could happen tomorrow at fMC. And, as Rimm-Kaufman pointed out, a change in character limits would likely also necessitate a change in image sizes, too.

Facebook is expected to stream the event tomorrow at facebook.com/business/fmc. That page says fMC runs from Noon to 6 pm (ET), but an agenda the company sent out this week says 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm.