October 22nd, 20114 New Facebook Features to Understand
Facebook marketing is definitely here to stay. Facebook has passed 800 million users, according to their own calculations, and this being based on the people who have logged-in in the past 30 days. Facebook pages and profiles are going through major changes. If we are going to develop our personal profiles for our career, we should keep ahead of these changes and make the most of them immediately. Changes to our profile type and even turning our profile into a page may benefit us. Facebook is more than just a social networking site. It is obvious they have big plans for the future. In actual fact, we are seeing them turn into more of a search engine, without actually saying so. Here, we look at some of the changes we should consider, and consider them inside the context of being found.
- Timeline. Timeline is a radical change to the way profiles have worked in the past. Timeline creates a timeline to what is happening on your Facebook profile. This brings a sense of what is important now and in the past. This will probably influence search features in the future. When something like this is introduced, we have to think about what it will be used for in the future, and how Facebook sees they can use it for. Timeline still has some bugs, and so changing to this type of profile immediately should be considered well.
- Map. An application to show where you have visited has been available for some time. This is being integrated in Facebook. Location services are important to the way Google searches for us, and knowing where we are. Geo-location is a big part of many new applications, whether they are on Facebook, or they are integrating with Facebook. Having this map of where you have been, and where you are, will have to influence search results in the future.
- Managing Your Feeds/Lists. Facebook was originally built so we could see everything that was going on from everyone. The amount of content when you have a lot of friends can get out of control. Facebook has changed that feature. We can now control whom we see, and who sees our content. Managing our feeds, and managing the distribution of our own content is a real issue. It is important we take the time to sort our which category, we are going to put our followers in. This may take some time considering we have many ‘friends’ and we have different information we wish to share with different people. This is a response to Google’s Circles, which are using on Google+ from the start. With Facebook, we have to go back through all those relationships and sort them out.
- New Look. The way Facebook has looked since we all got to know it has also changed. If you are taking your personal profile seriously, and you use it for your career and other professional arrangements, it will be important to influence the way others are viewing you on their Facebook profile. Now we can control how much we see of someone’s stories, for example. Making sure you are included in the top stories of other users will be important, or you could get lost in the whole mass of content. This will probably result in some one-to-one work by all of us, to ensure we are important those who are our ‘friends’. This idea of friends is really turning into something closer to ‘followers’, especially in terms of content being displayed on an individual’s Facebook page.
Personal online marketing is not an easy job any more. It all started off as us sharing information with our friends and family. Now, it is almost a fulltime job.
