Tag: Facebook

Facebook Pages Get a Major Upgrade

Facebook’s Pages program for businesses and other organizations got a major upgrade this afternoon with the implementation of changes that make pages much more like a personal profile. In fact, I think they are now calling pages “Public Profiles.” And I have added emphasis below to Facebook’s description of what I think is the most important new benefit:

By leveraging the real connections between friends on Facebook, a public profile lets users connect to the entities they care about and allows you to join the conversation. Posts by the public profile will soon start to appear in News Feed, giving you a more dynamic relationship with the public figures and organizations you are interested in.

A big problem with Pages, as opposed to groups or personal profiles, has been that when an organization wants to send information to its “fans” it must send an “Update” as opposed to a message that goes in the regular Facebook Inbox. But most users rarely check their updates; at least not anywhere near as regularly as they view their Inboxes. This has significantly reduced the usefulness of Pages.

Here are some other specific highlights of the changes (again, with emphasis added):

Update and share: Like a user profile, your Page can now update its Fans with statuses—short text-only messages. Soon, these statuses will appear in Fans’ News Feeds.

Tabbed Structure: The tabbed structure multiplies your possibilities. Similar to their functionality in user Profiles, tabs help keep Pages organized so people know where to go to get different pieces of information. The Wall tab is for dynamic content, the Info tab has static information, the Photos tab contains photos albums and Fan photos, etc.

Wall: The Wall tab closely resembles the Wall tab on a user profile. You and your Fans can use the turnkey publisher tool in the main column to share comments and even rich media. Posts by your Page go to your Fans’ News Feeds, and comments by your Fans go to their friends’ News Feeds. Those posts will hyperlink back to your Page.

Facebook has a Step by Step Guide to the new pages that is helpful, and the Best Practices documents for each particular kind of page (Public Figures, Music & Bands and Communities) also provide good guidance.

Check out our Mayo Clinic fan page, which we have adapted and republished with the new format.

Another major improvement is the ability to use the Notes application to import blog posts into your organization’s Facebook public profile. So, for example, we are importing our Sharing Mayo Clinic blog posts into our Mayo Clinic page, which will help create more readership and engagement.

Updates to fans are still available, and can be targeted to certain demographic groups among your fans. So, in the case of Mayo Clinic if we have a notice that only affects one of our three campuses, we could limit the distribution of the update to residents of a certain state.

I understand if some organizations have spent significant time customizing the look of their Pages, that they would not immediately appreciate the changed look. That explains some of the early angst among commenters on the Facebook announcement. But overall it’s a really good thing for organizations to have functionality that feels similar to personal profiles.

And the inclusion of status updates within the news feeds of fans is valuable enough all by itself to make the new Facebook pages a much better value for organizations.

Especially since everything you see on the Mayo Clinic page, for instance, is free!

The big remaining question is:

How soon is “soon?” 

If public profile updates will “soon” be published to the news feed, I’m hoping “soon” means tomorrow or next week.

Anyone have any insight on how soon “soon” is?

[ratings]

Facebook 201: Secret Groups as Your Free Small Business Intranet

I have a friend who has become seriously SMUG and wants to use Facebook and other social media tools in her home-based marketing business. She has an organization involved in selling stuff, and wants to be able to communicate with people in her marketing network, which is widely dispersed geographically.

In essence, she would like to create an intranet without the corporate firewall.

If her team members all had a company email address (e.g. personname@companyname.com), Yammer would be a great solution, and you can read all about it in the Yammer curriculum here at SMUG.

But that’s not the case in many small or home-based businesses, nor is it for my friend.

Let’s call her “Terri” (since that’s her name). One of “Terri’s” concerns is that when she does business-oriented work on Facebook, the things she posts get all mixed in with her personal Facebook feed. And while her business activities may not be super secret, she would like to keep personal and work activities somewhat segregated.

A Secret Group in Facebook can be a good answer in this case.

To use this, though, everyone in your group needs to be a Facebook “friend” — at least until you have invited them into your secret group, although there is a workaround, as I will explain below.

Here are the three steps to creating your free small business intranet, assuming you have already created your Facebook account. (You have done that, haven’t you?)

Continue reading “Facebook 201: Secret Groups as Your Free Small Business Intranet”

“Please breathe slowly into the brown paper bag…”

There’s been a bit of hyperventilating today about a change in Facebook’s Terms of Service (TOS). For example, Stan Schroeder says (on Mashable):

Yes, with Facebook Connect in place, it’s likely that Facebook simply must do this in order to avoid possible lawsuits over content that isn’t even stored by them anymore. However, the same commenter rightfully notices that “…yes, it also means they can sell your photos or use them in advertising with no recompense to you.”

It’s not just your stuff, it’s everyone’s stuff

The possible implications of this TOS change go beyond these concerns. Sure, you can choose not to use Facebook at all, but that doesn’t mean a thing. Someone can still take your photo, slap it on Facebook, and now neither you nor the author of the photo can stop Facebook from using the photo in whichever way they please.

Looking at it globally, millions of people are uploading bits of information on everyone and everything, to a huge online database, and by doing so they’re automatically giving away the rights to use or modify this information to a private corporation. And not only that; they now also waiver (sic) the right to ever take it back from it.

Facebook should take a long, deep look into how it treats its users. Until now, users had options with regards to how the data they generated on Facebook was used. Now, they have no options whatsoever, rather than quit the service altogether. It’s a major difference; I’m not going to take it lightly, and neither should you.

Actually, Stan’s take is a bit less extreme than some I’ve seen; at least he recognizes the need with Facebook Connect for Facebook to protect itself from lawsuits.

But for the others who are expressing such extreme distress over the change, I have one main question, and a few related thoughts:

Do you really think the photos of you are that interesting?

Facebook users upload nearly a BILLION PHOTOS A MONTH! I overstated that a bit; it’s really 850 million, but I rounded up for effect.

If you were to decide to delete your photos, do you think Mark Zuckerberg & Co. will forage through their digital trash so they can show your picture to some user from China?

This language change seems to me to be strictly about preventing frivolous lawsuits. If I delete a photo, I’m betting it will stay deleted. No one else cares about it. This new language just says I can’t sue if it does somehow surface.

Maybe professional photographers who make their living from photos would possibly have some concern about the change. But for us run-of-the-mill amateurs, I don’t think we have any cause for distress.

Meanwhile, here’s a good article from Time you should check out (hat tip: Daniel Rothamel): Why Facebook is for Old Fogies.

Florida Hospital Association SMUG Extension Course

I’m delighted to be in Orlando today for a SMUG extension class, presenting a workshop for the Florida Hospital Association’s Florida Society for Healthcare Public Relations & Marketing (FSHPRM) at their Winter professional development workshop. My presentation runs from 12:30-2 EST.

The slides I’m using are embedded below. I’m told there will be wifi in the room, so I’m hoping many of the participants can take the opportunity to add their comments and questions even during the presentation, either in the comment section on this post or by tweeting using the #fhasmug hashtag.

We’ll see if we can address some of the questions and comments at the end of the presentation, but if any SMUGgles are following along remotely and want to chime in with your observations, you’re most welcome to participate.

FSHPRM Presentation on Social Media 

View more presentations from LeeAase. (tags: social media)

A Few Resource Links:

Homework

Understanding that we likely have a wide range of social media familiarity among the workshop participants, I’ve outlined some options for your concrete action steps to make your the learning practical for you. I’m starting with basics and moving to more complicated or involved steps. Just go down the list and pick at least one thing you haven’t yet tried.

  1. Join Facebook. Facebook 102 would be a great place to start. You can request to join the FSHPRM group so you can all network and learn together. And of course I hope you’ll join the SMUG group, too.
  2. Get a Twitter account. Twitter 102 will take you through the process step-by-step. I have a bunch of courses yet to be added in the Twitter curriculum, but there are a few there to get you started, and you can follow me (@LeeAase) and/or @SMUG_U to keep up to date.
  3. Start a personal blog. Blogging 108 gives you the guidance you need.
  4. Try Yammer. Yammer is like Twitter for the workplace, and is limited to people who share your email domain. The Yammer curriculum has more background, but Yammer 101 gets you started.

If you’re one of those really risk-averse types who needs to completely scope out a situation before joining, you have two additional options:

  1. Begin the Core Courses, which are kind of the SMUG appetizer sampler platter. They’ll give you a hands-on taste of social media. Or, you can…
  2. Start the Podcasting curriculum, which takes you in 10 steps from an introduction to the podcast to having your own personal podcast listed in the iTunes store, all without spending any money. You can complete the first two courses without having to take any concrete action.

Finally, I hope you’ll enroll in SMUG so you can continue your social media exploration as a SMUGgle.

And if you’re on LinkedIn and would like to connect in that way (or perhaps leave a recommendation for me), that would be great, too. Here’s my public profile on LinkedIn.

When is 137% Growth in 4 Months “Not Keeping Up?”

The highlight of this post earlier this month on Inside Facebook was that women over age 55 are the fastest growing demographic in Facebook.

While the fastest growing age group by total users is still 26-34, the number of women over 55 on Facebook grew by an astounding 175.3% since the end of September.  Their male counterparts, however, weren’t able to keep up – growing by only 137.8%.  The number of women over 55 on Facebook almost double the number of men over 55 on Facebook today.

It says something about the phenomenal growth of Facebook that men over 55 could increase by nearly 140 percent in just four months, and that it would be considered “not keeping up” with their female counterparts.

It’s not surprising to me that the growth among women is faster than that among men. I see that among colleagues at work, and with my wife and her friends (all of whom are well under 55, but still baby boomers.) This is particularly interesting for people involved in health care communications, since women play the primary role in family health care decisions.

If you work in health care and you’re not in Facebook yet, you should be.

The SMUG Facebook curriculum can help you get started.