How are Facebook Changes Going to Affect Your Profile?
New Facebook Timeline, applications and ticker enhance social media experience
As a Social Media Mad Scientist for Brand Journalists, I help our clients develop social media strategies to increase customer engagement through social media outlets. Social media involves ever-evolving platforms for businesses to connect and build relationships with their clientele, and success requires staying on top of the latest trends.
Facebook is easily the most popular social media platform to date. But how can clients rely on this useful tool when it constantly changes? To make transitioning easier, I keep up with all the changes Facebook makes and work with our clients individually to ensure their engagement continues to increase.
Right now lots of changes are taking place on Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg announced some of them on a livestream at F8 yesterday morning and informed everyone that the bar has been raised. The addition of Timeline, Ticker and a streaming news feed are tools that will help leverage engagement, but they might be confusing at first.
Let’s take a look at some of these additions:
What is Ticker?
You may have noticed Ticker already. Ticker is located at the top right of your home page. This is an up-to-second feed of what is going on with your friends. This can be anything that they do on Facebook. There are millions of Facebook users and the average user has hundreds of fans. The news feed – how we see what others are doing – only displays a fraction of what’s going on. The new ticker gives you everything, real-time.
While some people think this may be a too much information, it scrolls quickly and you can choose to check it out, ignore it or click to hide it if you don’t want the distraction. Either way, you can now see both the trimmed down news feed and the real time flow of activity.
What is Timeline?
Timeline will be your new personal profile. In short, Timeline will be a timeline of your life, with your status updates, your pictures, your music and all other information you put on Facebook The user can choose significant items for the timeline instead of just recent updates. This will eliminate the “Older Posts” link at the bottom of your profile. If you want your friends to see a particular story from a year ago, you can add that to your timeline, so it doesn’t disappear in the sea of information. Facebook also automatically features significant events, such as graduations, births, marriages, etc.
“Timeline is the story of your life,” said Zuckerberg. “All your stories, all your photos, all your apps.”
Another cool feature of Timeline is the statistics of your life at the end of a month or year. You can see how many people you became friends with, who posted on your wall, your top music, places you visited, pages you Liked and more. Your life, like any other story, has a beginning, middle and end.
Caution: Looking through your Timeline may provoke nostalgia.
To activate your Timeline now, visit this Mashable article for a step-by-step.
New Apps
Facebook is partnering with tons of companies to make sharing your interests with your friends easier. Spotify, just one of the companies partnering with Facebook, has already starting posting what people are listening to, just a day after the announcement. This doesn’t just pertain to music, but also news, movies and any other media a person can come up with. To go right along with the Facebook change, Spotify became open today for everyone in the U.S. to sign up, without an invitation. Netflix and Hulu are not far behind.
Business Fan Pages
Facebook hasn’t announced how these new updates will affect Fan pages yet, but Fan pages already have one significant changed. In the past, a Facebook user would have to Like the fan page to post on the wall. Now, anyone can post on the wall, whether they have Liked the page or not. This will annoy people and companies that measure weekly Likes, but we have to remember, engagement on Facebook fan pages can be measured in other ways.
Facebook has done a good job of making itself much more relevant with these changes. I think you’ll like what you see when your timeline goes live.