by Jeanine Vecchiarelli return to JayVee Media Link LLC
Facebook changes was a topic I discussed two months ago. I began that post by jokingly saying the only thing constant about the platform is change. True to form, Facebook has announced another round of…you guessed it: changes! The internet has been abuzz about this news for the past week, speculating about the potential benefits and adjustments platform users may need to make. Let’s take a look at the big three changes that are coming our way:
Facebook’s redesigned news feed will feature much larger, more eye catching visuals. Pictures and videos will present much bigger, as will the thumbnails that show when we converse or share links. These changes will bring the desktop appearance into line with how the news feed looks on mobile devices.
An interesting thought to ponder is how the new news feed will impact our businesses. Obviously, the larger graphics – including those contained in our ads – will be helpful. And now, when people “like” our pages a small graphic of our cover photos as well as our profile pictures will appear in their and their friends’ news feeds. But since the default will be “all friends,” will our other posts be denied access unless users deliberately click on the “following” choice for their feeds? This remains to be seen. I doubt Facebook will do anything to negatively impact our businesses, since they could risk losing our patronage AND our ad dollars. Things may be a bit bumpy until the changes settle in. But I’m sure plenty of tweaks will be made to ensure our businesses will be seen. In the mean time, it makes sense to continue doing the things we are doing to boost our chances of being found: having complete, optimized “about” sections with links to our websites and other social sites; lots of appealing visual posts; original and shared posts that contain excellent value for our followers; fostering and supporting good engagement on our pages.
On the topic of Facebook’s 20% text rule, many of us have been struggling to be sure our business cover pictures are in compliance. Until now we haven’t been able to do much more than take educated guesses. Happily, a new tool to take the guesswork out of the process is currently in beta. The Facebook Cover-Photo Compliance Tool allows us to upload our cover pics, which will then appear with a grid over them. Clicking the grid squares over text areas will tell us what percentage of our cover pictures contains text. Do note, though, that the tool is currently incapable of uploading cover photos for business pages that have limitations of any kind; e.g., age or location.
Four additional changes in just under three months. Facebook is on the move! What do you think of the platform’s newest roll outs? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below!
Thank you so very much for your post. It was very informative and I appreciate it. I always appreciate your posts. Have a great week !!!
You’re very welcome, Ken! I’m always happy to hear that our posts provide helpful information for our favorite readers! 🙂
Believe it or not, since this post published Facebook has rolled out another new feature or two. I would amend this post, but it’s already long enough. 1. We now have the ability to respond directly to a particular comment in our comment streams. We need only enable the feature in the admin panel of our business pages. If an option box doesn’t automatically pop up, we can go to “edit page,” then “manage permissions” to enable. And 2. I mentioned in our post that a small version of our business cover pictures and our profile pics are published in the news feeds of those who have newly liked our pages and of their friends. Even better, Facebook gives the readers of that information the ability to “like” our business pages themselves right from there by adding a “like this page” option at the end of the news feed entry!
Thanks for sharing the information. I do like the new Timeline format. I have been getting a lot of requests from friends to take them off the part where anyone can view pictures of them and their families. I’m not so sure that is new, but it seems to be making people nervous. There is just so much information that people put on facebook, perhaps it’s time people take control of their own privacy. If you don’t want it viewed,,..well don’t post it. Facebook can be fun, but, let’s face it, they are not exactly protecting our privacy.
You are absolutely correct about the privacy concerns, Sandra. While Facebook’s grand pubahs assure that they allow us every opportunity to control the privacy of our posts, the platform makes its money in large part by targeting ads to the preferences of its users – based on….you got it…the personal information they provide. This is especially the case with the new Graph Search feature that is still being rolled out. Graph Search can’t work effectively if it can’t access our personal preferences via reading them and our posts. Of course, if we set these things to private the tool won’t breach our settings. The grand pubahs are counting on collecting the information their tool needs to assimilate from the millions of users who don’t properly set their privacy controls. We ALL need to take the time to review and if necessary refine those privacy settings if we desire to keep our information from more public viewing. And of course, the safest route is to not post anything we don’t want even POTENTIALLY shared. Bottom line: there’s no such thing as total privacy on the worldwide web.