Saturday, October 1, 2011

Facebook Changes Have You Confused?

Greetings fellow social media gods and goddesses. Have you recovered from the shock of the new changes facebook did at the end of September 2011????  Has it left you scratching your head as to what these changes are all about?  Well do not get too comfortable as more changes are on the way. 


So lets peek at these new changes and how they can work for you......


The first one is the newsfeeds. They have combined what was once top stories and most recent all into 1 feed.  What is confusing is if you look want to see things in a time line order. They idea with the change is so that you see what interests you most first and then the posts in a time line format. All the same information should be there but to be honest I too struggle at times with missing somethings that were posted. So after playing around with this I just read everything but now it just takes a wee bit more time....I never used the previous top story option very often. 

Now the smart lists was a "smart idea". Here you can create lists of your friends and read only those posts. This is a great way to be sure you do not miss anything and you only read those who posts you want to be sure you get to see. You have the control here. This gives you great flexibility so that if you want to read only what your business friends are posting you can do just that. You can even restrict what some friends see. Your close friends likes and such will also now show up in your notifications. It does make it easier to follow those you want to the most and not miss anything. These lists is one of my favorite changes they have done in this go around.

Another new feature is the Subscribe option. If you are friends with somebody you already subscribed by default. What this option does is allow those who have reached the 5,000 friend limit have people subscribe to their "public" posts. The keyword here is PUBLIC. As you now have the flexibility to alter posts on an individual basis as to what friends see, friends of friends and public. If privacy is a concern then set all our setting to friends only and you will have no issues with people seeing posts you do not want them to see. 


So what is the deal with the ticker as they call it???? Now that is a very good question. It does allow you to see posts without having to leave your home page and leave comments. I suppose for a time factor this is a useful feature. It is in real time and is much like Twitter in that respect so if you are use to twitter you will love this feature.  

If you have a business page, they made some changes there too. You no longer have to have 25 followers to get a custom name. I have heard that some were having trouble with this working but I suspect the bugs gave been worked out.  They also now have a feature that will show you when your friends comment or like a post. The idea is so that you know when a friend has interacted with your page. Usefulness??? That is up to you to decide. 


Facebook leaders seem to feel that facebook gets stale if they do not make changes. They also seem to feel that people are not emotionally attached to their experience and use it cause well what else is there. So to get their users loving their experience once again, they are rolling out changes. It is up to you to decide their success but before you do give yourself time to adjust. There are more changes coming and I suspect these current ones will make more sense once they roll everything out. 


If you use facebook for business you will have to adjust and find new ways to be effective with your marketing. This is not necessarily a bad thing. So be open to the changes and see how you can do things better.  


Until our next adventure together....happy posting.







 

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