10 New Changes to Facebook that will Impact Your Facebook Marketing

Facebook is constantly tinkering with its ecosystem and manages to stir up and annoy its natives as they attempt to adapt to the new changes.

Protests and feelings ran so high with the latest changes that a Mashable survey found over 70% “hated” the new Facebook news feed changes.

The challenge for Facebook marketers is keeping up with the changes that matter. Some are cosmetic others will possibly impact engagement by fans and  increase or reduce “likes”

Recently there have been some announcements by Facebook that have impacted both the personal and brand pages of Facebook that will need to be considered by Facebook marketers.

5 Facebook Changes to Personal Profiles

1. Newsfeed Ticker

This has maybe created the most discussion with personal users of Facebook. The news feed ticker contains posts and contains “activity stories” such as likes and comments. It is real time and is almost a “mini me” version of a Google+ live stream.
The “recent stories” area now only contains posts from friend, pages, subscriptions and stories posted by apps.
Previous posts may now have a longer life as they will again appear in the ticker when people make comments and you can click on the ticker item to see the post again.

2. Smart Lists

Facebook automatically creates several lists these are school, family and your city ( you can even edit the radius of this list beyond the pre-set 10 mile setting). You can also easily merge lists and easily send a post to just one list. You cannot delete them once you have created them, only hide them.

3. The News Feed

The news feed has now been changed to Top Stories (indicated by a small blue triangle in the top left corner) and is determined by Facebook according to your interaction. Also added is Recent Stories, which are a chronological feed.
Remember only posts such as status updates, photos, videos, check-ins and posts from applications like “Networked Blogs” will appear in the news feed.

4. The Subscribe Button

The subscribe button allows you to make your personal profile more public. You can ensure that subscribers see your public updates. This can be done without having to “friend” people. This is a feature well suited to a more “public figure”

5. Timeline

The personal profile page is now called “Timeline”. It has also now been called your personal scrap book. So you now have the ability to go back in time. You can also hide stories, feature a story or change the privacy settings
For more detail on these changes read Social Media Examiners article by Andrea Vahl.

5 Facebook Changes to Company “Pages”

Facebook has introduced a new metric called “People Talking About This” which will publicly reflect the number of conversations happening about the brand “page”. So we now have a new number to measure in the new page “Insights” analytics tool.

1. New Page Insights Analytics Tool

With the new “Page” Insights tool, Pages can:

• See how posts they put on their Page reach people on Facebook – beyond their fans.
• See Total Likes, number of Friends of Fans of a Page, the new public and internal Pages metric, ‘People talking about this’, and Weekly Total Reach of a Page
• Optimize content for posts -whether they’re photos, videos, questions, etc. – see what’s working best at reaching the most people, and how to increase the viral nature of these posts.

2. People Talking About This

This new metric  measures the number of stories that measures people’s interaction with your fan page opver the past seven days. This includes

• Liking your Page
• Posting to your wall
• Liking, commenting or sharing one of your Page posts or other content on your page  such as photos, videos and albums
• Answering a question you posted
• RSVP-ing to one of your events
• Mentioning your Page, phototagging your Page
• Liking or sharing a check-in deal, or checking in at your Place.

Apart from the number of “likes” this will measure your Brand “Buzz” on Facebook.  This metric appears under the number of “likes” in the left column.

3. Conversations on Pages

Conversations on Pages let brands reach more than just their Fans – which is important in increasing awareness, finding new customers, and even driving sales. This reach extends to “Friends of Fans” which would give my Fan page a reach of nearly 2 million.  Studies by Starbucks has found that friends of fans transacted 11% more frequently. According to CommScore they are also much more likely to to visit a store, website and purchase.

4. Premium Ad Unit

Facebook is also introducing a new expanded Premium ad unit that combines Page posts with social context from your friends when available. When the person viewing this brand’s ad has friends connected to this brand’s Page, Facebook will expand the unit to include a line above that shares which friends like the Page – thus combining the brand’s voice in the ad with a friend’s voice, together.

5. Facebook Page Insights API

To encourage third party development and analytics innovation, Facebook is also announcing a Page Insights API for the analytics developer community, so that they can create customized Page Insights solutions for existing and potential clients.
For more on these changes read Search Engine Land’s article

More Reading

• Do Shared Links Last Longer on Twitter or Facebook
• How to Increase Your Blog Traffic by 55% with One Button
• 5 Motivations for Sharing Content
• 20 Ideas for Social Media Content that Engages
• Is it Better to Share on Google, Facebook or Twitter?
• 9 Questions to Ask your Customers When Creating Content

Image by David Berkowitz