Facebook is expanding its ‘structured status updates’ to its mobile service, letting people add emotions and actions to their posts while on the move.
Initially launched back in January this year, the emotive status updates encourage users to throw in additional context to what they’re doing.
Facebook recently allowed users on mobile web (not the native Facebook application) to post these more visual status updates.
Now when a user goes to post a status from the Facebook mobile website, a smiley face is seen on the status update prompt, similar to the one seen on desktop.
When a user taps the smiley, they are given the full menu of emoticon-enhanced status updates, showing that they’re feeling, eating, or watching something.
The move is crucial to Facebook’s attempt to boost its mobile ad revenues through better targeting. By encouraging users to add more details about their life, Facebook is able to better gauge their immediate interests that can’t be figured out by simple “Likes.”
In fact, Mark Zuckerberg during the Q4 earnings call, mentioned in passing a key detail about Facebook’s strategy moving forward.
Facebook in 2013 is making an effort with scraping the content that you’re publishing on its platform. For instance, based on an example Zuckerberg provided, he said that if you haven’t identified your location, but shared it in an update, Facebook will be able to figure out where you are.
This same strategy applies to this personalised status update that Facebook is experimenting with. If you’re sharing immediate interests via emotive status updates, Facebook would be able to better target its ads accordingly.
Read Facebook’s blog post here
