Facebook hosted its annual F8 conference this week, announcing several new features on the horizon both big and small. With a focus on more responsible uses of tech and a rejuvenated focus on fostering communication between friends and loved ones, this year’s event felt a bit like the start of a new era—helped by the surprise release of an entirely new mobile app design.

Facebook’s vision has always been to bring people together, and at this year’s F8 conference the company placed its focus away from the News Feed and toward more genuine forms of communication, like Groups, Messenger and Stories. These features not only help friends and loved ones connect in new and more engaging ways, but can help brands engage more directly as well.

Offering More Direct Forms of Communication

Let’s start with Groups: Facebook killed its standalone Groups app nearly two years ago, but this week unveiled a new core app design that places Groups at the forefront, promoting them in different areas of the platform. This means users might find buy and sell groups promoted when exploring the Marketplace section of the app, for example. In addition to providing better visibility, Facebook is also enabling features specific to group types, like a template for employers to easily list job openings in groups for job seekers.

Facebook has also showed off more one-to-one types of interaction designed for smoother socializing and forming new relationships. Its Meet New Friends feature introduces users within shared communities, while its Dating feature offers a Tinder-like system that brings together people who share romantic interest in one another. Over on Messenger, meanwhile, friends can hang out virtually by watching videos together or even work together with a desktop app that allows for multitasking.

What’s interesting with these announcements is that the role of the News Feed—or at least broadcasting updates to it—becomes downplayed as Facebook explores other ways to bring people together through more direct forms of communication.

Chatbots are Invading Instagram

Chatbots aren’t new—Facebook popularized the medium at its 2016 F8 conference—but they’re about to get a lot better on Messenger. The most notable new feature is integration into Instagram ad units. Brands can include CTA’s in their Instagram ads that encourage users to swipe up to chat with an associate. A bot can handle the earlier stages of the conversation to qualify leads, then pass those leads along to a live agent. “It’s the perfect balance of scaling conversations for more basic interactions, while ensuring that qualified leads and complex customer service interactions are handled by real people,” says Nick Fuller, SVP of Growth at MediaMonks.

Another interesting thing about this functionality is how it brings different platforms in the Facebook family together: users may initiate a chat on Instagram, but the conversation happens within Messenger. “What’s important here is that Facebook is discovering more and more integration points of customer data and experience across their platforms,” says Fuller. “This means brands have the opportunity to target on one platform but easily retarget on another.”

The integration with Instagram ads highlights the success that brands have been having with its Stories format. “Stories is a really high-performing ad space for Facebook,” says Fuller. “With this chatbot integration into Instagram ads, brands can take users through the funnel with targeting, lead qualifying and conversion happening in one seamless flow—which is incredible,” said Fuller.

Bring Offline Spaces to Life

Facebook Camera Effects are cool and all—we wrote the book on it—but Facebook is looking beyond photo sharing to explore other opportunities where AR provides value. For example, users could scan a poster that transforms it into a three-dimensional scene or model, whether it be a portal that looks inward or an object that spills out of the surface, beyond physical constraint.

Fuller sees endless creative possibilities for brands that want to digitally engage with their customers within a physical environment. “This will be a killer feature for brands to reach users in retail or event spaces, for example” he says. This can range from fun moments (digital scavenger hunts that encourage you to explore an amusement park) to practical (a tutorial, viewed from multiple angles, showing how to put furniture together).

“From a product education standpoint, having the ability to aim your camera at a sign to achieve this is going to be a really helpful next-level AR capability.” We’ve seen how harnessing emerging technology can have huge benefits to getting customers to explore brick and mortar retail, so we’re excited to see how new leaps in accessible, scalable AR will further transform the physical shopping experience.

In addition to the features mentioned above, Facebook reiterated a couple key themes of the F8 conference: responsible use of technology (by combating fake news, making AI more inclusive and more) and a shift away from being a “social network” to a “social platform.” The new era for Facebook looks perfectly structured for enabling direct communication between brands and their fans, and we can’t wait to see how the platform further shapes up in the next year.

Can’t wait to dazzle Facebook users with SparkAR?

In the middle of April, an eagle-eyed user discovered a news feed format explored via swiping, much like how users interact with Instagram and Facebook Stories. Initially suspected to be a bug, Facebook confirmed that the new newsfeed was indeed an early, internal prototype.

While it’s possible the prototype won’t see the light of day in its current form or even at all—it’s very much a work in progress, according to the Digital Trends story linked above—the interface got the creative wheels turning in our Monks’ heads. We spoke to Jon Biggs, an Executive Creative Director at MediaMonks who’s worked closely on a majority of our Facebook projects, about what a potential new news feed could mean for brands and users alike.

A News Feed Responding to New Behavior

A year ago, Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post that content consumption on the platform is typically light on interaction and engagement: “Too often today, watching video, reading news or getting a page update is just a passive experience,” he wrote. While users can like or react to content, until recently there were few content formats that really allowed users to interact. In fact, we found that users spent only 1.7 seconds viewing a given piece of content on the news feed, prompting us to develop new formats that react to user behavior. As a platform, Facebook is likewise offering new, interactive formats like Camera Effects and 3D photos to inspire users to act.

Its Stories-inspired news feed prototype may signal Facebook’s desire to support more visually engaging, interactive formats. One year ago, after all, TechCrunch reported that sharing via Stories was growing 15-times faster than on the news feed; the reasoning behind the news feed prototype, then, could be to better support user behaviors when it comes to sharing or engaging with friends and loved ones.

“Facebook has introduced a lot of lovely formats that let brands achieve a lot more value within the space they have,” says Biggs. “This setup shows how they’re not restricting themselves to scrolling through the same old timeline, but looking at how the space can be used more effectively.”

That point on effectiveness is important, according to Biggs. Greater screen real estate can open the door to gorgeous new content, but brands must think critically about the value the content has on their experience. “If you have the whole screen to work with, you must make sure what you put there is really interesting,” Biggs says. “If not, then you’re interrupting the user experience—and you need to justify that interruption with something worthwhile.” Effective channel strategy built in response to user behavior is key for designing content that users will find valuable rather than annoying—especially when they’re presented with a rapid-fire stream of content as seen in Stories.

More Room to Love

The possibility of utilizing the full screen is particularly exciting for Biggs. “Posts on the news feed are quite limited and small,” he says—think of the truncated text post or small thumbnails appended to a link share. But the Stories-inspired format could provide brands with full-size content akin to Facebook’s Instant Articles, which are presented within a swipe-able carousel of content as well.

As a creative, Biggs is especially interested in how taking interactions from one part of the Facebook platform—the camera feed—to another can take engagement on the channel to a new level. “Facebook presents a nice space where you can take advantage of all the natural things people do with a phone: hold it, turn it around, shake it,” says Biggs. Selfie lenses let users play while checking themselves out with the camera, for example, while 3D or 360-degree photos transform devices into viewfinders that gaze into an alternate space. “If we begin to think about new ways to explore content, which might have been inspired by other channels themselves, how can we learn from that and make better things for Facebook?”

The Sign of More Changes to Come?

The unearthing of the Stories-inspired news feed prototype isn’t the first time Facebook has shown an interest in pulling together various platforms or channels within its suite of services. Earlier this year, Zuckerberg expressed plans to merge the backends of Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram. The move to unify the backends would allow for easier end-to-end encryption, which is currently WhatsApp’s key differentiating factor. In addition to encryption across the platforms, the move could potentially harmonize the data between them, making it easier to surface up the types of content most relevant to users from their interactions across one platform to another.

“Is this prototype the first stage of Facebook pulling various parts of its ecosystem together?” Biggs asks rhetorically. He suggests that brands and users not hold their breath on a single platform that combines all three. “Putting all three platforms together would be risky from a user’s perspective,” he says, “as each excels at a different purpose: WhatsApp supports a more traditional conversation between people; Instagram is glossy and visual; while Facebook is most ideal for publishers.”

The real interesting development, says Biggs, is how interactions on one channel might continue to influence others: “They’re cross-pollinating the knowledge across the social ecosystem they’ve built.” How might future amalgams of the platforms drive new creative opportunities for brands to forge deeper relationships with their audiences? Only time will tell—though brands may want to study up on the myriad of user behaviors native to these platforms now so they’re ready to adapt to the next big change.

Innovate to give your Facebook audience something to smile about.