With so many Facebook updates in one month, what would be better than having one all-inclusive post summarizing the updates you need to know about?
Profile Related Updates
1. Tainted news feeds – Facebook decided to implement filtered news feeds for everybody.
Status updates will be shown from people who your profile has recently interacted with, or “featured people”. A few of my friends like to watch certain “train wreck” profiles. We all know it’s best to not even get involved with certain people, but that doesn’t mean you don’t find their updates entertaining. To see those updates from the distant friends, you must now change the option in your settings.
2. Masthead – This one applies to both pages and profiles. Since the fan pages have more updates, it makes sense to list here. This change made a rather large splash on the social media channels. It is set up to display images from the recent galleries or can be used for branding purposes.
Page Related Updates
1. Tabs are gone: Now the pre-existing tabs can be found as buttons on the sidebar.
2. Iframe’s are the way of the fan page future. FBML, or Facebook Markup Language, is going away as of March 10. Applications already built with FBML will continue to work, from that point on, no custom apps can be built with FBML any more.
3. Become your page’s identity. My biggest pet peeve was not having the ability to connect with other users on behalf of your brand or page. Now, you can switch personas and connect, post, and interact with people on behalf of your page. Still have a few kinks to work out, like commenting on a page status update with a personal profile, but it’s a very good start.
Facebook recently updated their privacy policy, which has had a warm reception on the web. Power users feel it was finally written for every day folk, instead of the copy aimed at lawyers. Now if they could just get the everyday users to read it! Let’s see if the recent notoriety at the Oscars with “The Social Network” will motivate the FB crew to to keep up with the rapid pace of updates, similar to what we have seen during February.
Did we miss any important Facebook marketing announcements from February? Feel free to add any in the comments.
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