• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 3, 2012

Since many users don’t trust Facebook’s privacy controls, companies find consumers are reluctant to share brand preferences on the social network.

Content management firm Thismoment taped Facebook's Open Graph to build out a distributed network that automatically sends notifications to friends with each interaction in real-time. The notices, inserted into Facebook's timeline, ticker, and news feeds, mention a brand, such as seeing the "Batman" movie trailer, without relying on users signaling a “Like.” 

A recent study from MyBuys and the consultancy The E-tailing Group looked at brand campaign responses on Facebook. Fifty-seven percent of respondents to the survey are much more concerned about sharing personal information and shopping preferences with retailers on Facebook, compared with retailers in stores.

More than half of the 1,000 consumers participating in the survey found a higher propensity to provide shopping preferences to retailers in stores in exchange for a better shopping experience. When asked about geographic targeting content on mobile devices to gain a better shopping experience, 42% of surveyed consumers have mixed feelings -- 34% don't want it, and 24% said they do.

Consumers seem more willing to share personal information and preferences with retailers in stores than on Facebook. That may explain why companies like Thismoment have developed tools that share brand information with users, other than liking, sharing or connecting online.

But "like" doesn't mean anything without identifying the action the person took, such as watching the “Batman” trailer. Friends learn about the action, without a concurrent approval. Brands now can build the suite of Thismoment services into Facebook apps, brand pages, YouTube brand pages, mobile sites and more. Advertisers select from a set list of actions and objects. The tool generates stories about the Facebook member's interaction with the brand.

Intended to improve ad targeting and ROI, the out-of-the-box tools come with reporting capabilities allowing brands to analyze news feed impressions, click-through rates and actions from a variety of platforms, according to Jon Eccles, product manager and tech lead at Thismoment.

The process is similar to the way Spotify sends a notification to a Facebook member's list of friends when one listens to a music track. The notification gets distributed at the moment the person listens to the music.