What Facebook’s Latest Updates Mean for Your School
This past week, Facebook announced some major changes to privacy and publishing controls for individual user profiles. In addition to that, they announced new tagging and sharing functionality. The changes, more than a dozen in all, fall into two areas – privacy changes to user profiles and changes to how users share content. Strategy for reaching your school’s audience will be changing yet again, but for the better.
Sharing Your School’s Content
Facebook’s Publisher bar has been modified and now includes three parts: locations, tags, and control over who can see that status update.
Individual users can set it so their friends can tag them without approval, but tags must be approved from non-friends – leading into another change to profiles: Users now have the ability to tag anybody in a post or a photo, regardless of whether that person is a Facebook friend, subject to tag approval. This makes it possible to tag a large group of people from on campus events at your school, such as job fairs, open houses, bake sales, etc.
Facebook Places has also been incorporated directly into the Publisher bar. Users can tag a location from the browser or mobile application. The restriction to tag places only a short distance from your GPS location has now been scrapped. Let’s say for example you’re taking a trip to six of your school’s campuses in a few different states. You stop in Ohio the first day and forget to check in. The next day you’re in Kentucky and realize that you forgot to tag that you were at the Ohio campus. Prior to these changes, there was nothing you could do. Now, you can tag the Ohio campus from the Kentucky campus if you need to!
As a result of this change, the Places icon in the iOS and Android applications have been removed and replaced by a “Nearby” icon. The “Nearby” icon displays recent check ins in your area. Checking into a location will now happen from the status update. Users can also tag locations to photo albums or individual photos or videos.
Privacy Changes
Facebook has made some new changes to status controls. Previously, a lock icon controlled who could see your status update. Now that icon will change based on whether it’s a public update or a custom update. The “Everyone” option has been renamed to “Public” for clarity. The option to change the visibility of status updates after they’re published is also a new change.
Another big change to sharing content involves untagging. Facebook is now providing more options for when users untag themselves from Facebook content. There are now three options: untagging yourself from a photo, asking the photo uploader to remove the photo, and blocking that person on Facebook. This is a result of Facebook users previously being unclear on their untagging options.
Takeaway
These changes provide your school with better engagement opportunities. Since location tags will now be in status updates, they will be appearing more than they ever did in users’ news feeds. So when your students are tagging your college as the location they’re at in their status updates, they’re giving your school more exposure as opposed to when they were checking in.
Since users will now be able to choose whether to publish individual items publicly, to friends, or customized subsets, this may impact your school’s search engine results and rankings. Users may now choose to limit sharing of brand-related content, which potentially could reduce impressions and engagement for your school. To ensure their messages continue to be shared on Facebook, your school needs to start thinking now about improving audience targeting and content relevancy when posting content that show up in the news feeds of people who “like” your page(s).
