New Facebook Features Pack Potential for Schools
On Wednesday, Facebook announced the launch of some interesting new products. Three to be exact – group chat, a new design for the existing chat, and video calling. So what will these new changes mean for your school’s Facebook page? With the products just rolling out, it’s too soon to tell, but they certainly pack a lot of potential.
During his introduction to these new products, CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave his opinion on the state of social media today. He said, unlike the past five years, people no longer question whether social networking is a passing fad. Social media is everywhere and its place has been cemented in our society.
The evidence is in the numbers. There are now over 750 million users on Facebook. Zuckerberg himself doesn’t like to use this metric. He thinks Facebook should not be measured by the amount of users, but by the amount of content that users are sharing on the network. Well, in that case, the number is 4 billion. That’s the amount of content – photos, videos, links, etc. – being shared on Facebook every day.
Now that these social networks exist, their importance is no longer questioned, and people are already connected– what’s next? According to Zuckerberg, it’s to build new applications and tools on top of the existing social network to better enhance communication. Hence, Facebook’s new partnership with Skype, a move Zuckerberg described as “the best technology coupled with the best social infrastructure.”
The new Facebook video calling feature will work like this: you’ll click on the call button on your friend’s profile, which will appear between the poke button and the message button in the upper right hand corner of the screen. This will prompt a video chat request to pop-up in your friend’s browser. If your friend accepts, he or she will have to download a plug-in, which should take between 10 to 20 seconds. An imbedded video player will then pop up in your browser and you’ll be chatting with your friend face-to-face.
The new Facebook chat design will make it easier to find which of your friends are online and available to chat. Soon a sidebar will appear along the right hand side of the screen displaying your friends who are online, with your most messaged friends at the top. For the first time, you’ll also be able to chat with multiple friends at once with the new group chat feature, which Zuckerberg noted was the most requested of the new features. Once you are chatting with a friend, you’ll be able to click and drag more friends into the conversation. Users can even add friends to the chat who are not online, and they’ll receive a summary of the chat later on.
For now, these new features will only be affecting personal accounts and will not impact your school’s page. But don’t rule anything out! Zuckerberg said this is just the beginning of launching season and merging video chat with group chat has already been considered.
While it’s not there just yet, imagine the possibilities these new Facebook features could give your school’s social network. Your school is already connected with your students, graduates, and prospective students on Facebook, and now these new features will better enhance these connections. Maybe the Admissions Department could streamline online information session with the power of group chat, or answer a prospective student’s questions face-to-face with video chat (a much more personal approach than email). Likewise, the Career Services Department could possibly use group chat or video calling to answer questions and give advice to graduates who are searching for jobs, ideas that Effective Student Marketing has outlined in our new eBook “17 Tips for Connecting Career Services and Social Media.”
The possibilities are endless. It will be very interesting to see how these new features are adopted and consumed by the people on your network and the staff and faculty at your school.
Zuckerberg made it clear that this is just the beginning of launching season and to expect “lots more fun stuff to roll out” in the coming weeks and months. Hold on to your seats and stay tuned to the Effective Student Marketing Blog for the very latest Facebook news and how it affects your school.
