Facebook Changes: Everything You Need to Know

Facebook is yet again rolling out new changes. There have been a lot changes recently… so many that it has been hard to keep track! The changes that are in the process of rolling out are important though – you will definitely need to pay attention since they are going to impact your college’s Facebook presence and how you engage with your fans.

Here’s a guide to the Facebook changes that are taking place:

1. • Facebook Timeline – in shorter terms, this is a scrapbook of your life. It will be a stream of information about you, including all the photos you’ve posted, all of your status updates, the apps you’ve used, and places you’ve visited on a world map. This encourages users to post more content from the past, such as baby pictures. The further back in the Timeline you go, the more Facebook can compress your information and show only the most interesting stories and pictures. Timeline is in beta now and is currently opt-in only. In the future, it will be the new default profile page.
2. • You don’t have to just “like” something on Facebook. Now you can [verb] any [noun] something, too! If you think back far enough, Facebook didn’t allow you to “like” comments on wall posts or status updates .That seems laughable right now, doesn’t it? Well pretty soon the fact that the only action you could do on Facebook was “like” a wall post, comment, business, product, or a person will be laughable as well. The network has launched Facebook Gestures, which means that Facebook’s partners and developers can turn any verb into a button. Soon you’ll start seeing the option to tell the world that you’re “Listening” to a certain song, or that you’re “Watching” a particular movie. Facebook is encouraging its users to over share! You will see far more information on your news feed than you probably care about.
3. • Facebook apps only need to ask permission once to share stories on the behalf of the user. In the past, apps had to ask every time they shared information from an individual user’s profile. Now the first time you authorize the app, it will tell you what it’s going to share about you.
4. • All “lightweight” information will be shared in the Ticker. Status updates, photos from your friend’s vacation or weekend out, changes in a relationship status, etc. will still show up in your news feed. The FarmVille and Mafia Wars information, stuff that the average Facebook user doesn’t care to see, is going to appear in the Ticker. The Ticker is a real-time list of things your friends are posting that scrolls down the side of your screen.
5. • You can now watch TV, listen to music, and read news within Facebook. Thanks to many new partnerships there are now many things you can do without having to ever leave Facebook. If you want to watch a show on Hulu or listen to a song on Spotify, you can do this within Facebook. You can even look at the Ticker and see what your friends are watching, listening to, or reading. The Ticker allows you to share the experience with your Facebook friends just by clicking the link.
6. • Facebook has more users and engagement than it ever has before. Facebook hit 800 million users, and the majority of them are active! Facebook just saw a new record for the most visitors in one day, which was 500 million!

We’re excited to see how these changes impact the world of social media marketing. The changes are going to require more out-of-the-box thinking on your marketing department and/or agency’s side of things. Sure the number of “likes” your school has on Facebook will still matter, but not nearly as much as how you’re going to get your students, graduates, and prospects to interact on the social networking platform.

– Lauren