Facebook is changing yet again. . .
Facebook puts more emphasis on the mobile web, with bigger images, and consistency between platforms
In a recent press conference, Mark Zuckerberg announced a major change to the way Facebook will look and behave, marking the first major overhaul of Facebook since the Timeline update of 2011.
You can view the “new” Facebook here – https://www.facebook.com/about/newsfeed
This latest change is focused on making Facebook much more of a mobile friendly service, providing more consistency between the desktop and the mobile versions of the site and app. The new Facebook news feed will add a new side navigation bar and more white space, and look much like other popular mobile news apps.
In addition, this latest change will focus more on allowing users to post and showcase bigger images, making Facebook much more of a visual showcase (much like Google+ has tried to do). This could all be due to Facebook’s accusation of Instragram last year, and the first major step of integrating the two popular social networks together.
The third major change in this new update that Facebook is rolling out offers more control over the newsfeed themselves. Facebook users will be allowed to set up different custom news feeds, and have greater control over how the feeds are displayed on their page.
Perhaps the best change of all is that Facebook will now allow the user to sort their news feed in a chronological order, instead of by Facebook’s current system of figuring out “Top Stories”.
What the Facebook Change Means to Businesses
If you are currently doing business on Facebook, and have a facebook business page – expect to have to make updates in the near future to adapt to these recent changes.
The good news though is that Facebook relies on businesses to buy advertising, and market their products to its millions of users. The knock since Facebook went public about a year ago, was that the advertisements that business purchased weren’t giving enough return on investment, and some big named advertisers such as General Motor’s pulled their ad dollars from the social network, causing Facebooks Stock to take a nosedive.
With that bad news affecting Facebook’s stock prices, expect this new update to allow businesses to better show off its products, making ads bigger (and more intrusive) in the user’s dashboard. In addition, Facebook will now allow for “passive sharing” allowing apps that the user installs to Facebook to automatically post updates to their walls. While current Apps state that now when you install them, the user has always had some ability to curtail what got published to their wall and what didn’t – from the news that we have read – the user will have less control over this, and business will have more control.
In addition to this “Passive sharing” and bigger, more visual ads – the Facebook Open Graph search engine will really begin to pick up steam – allowing business to be found easier, while also allowing the business to get more data about the users that follow them, allowing for more analytics, and perhaps “smarter advertising”.
As to your actual business page on Facebook – well remember having to change all your custom tabs, cover photos, etc when Timeline came out? Yeah – well you’ll probably have to do that all again! Remember, Facebook is mostly a FREE service – so you really don’t have a voice on when/where/what they do to the actual Facebook interface and design. To be successful, you have to pay attention to these changes – plan for them, and then adapt when they happen.
Need help updating your Facebook business pages? Give us a call at 508-425-6776 or Email Us for more details.
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The post Facebook’s Latest Changes – What you need to know appeared first on Massachusetts Web Designs.
