Apparently, for some it is. Yesterday, Facebook made some major changes to the way it displays users’ news feed. This was followed by much angst and gnashing of teeth. Soon, “I hate Facebook” pictures started showing up, followed by more supportive pictures like this:

More to come

In case you didn’t like yesterday’s changes, brace yourself because more “profound” changes are on the way. In fact, in an article from Mashable, Ben Parr tells us that he has seen the changes and “it’s going to change the world of social media.”

Change is hard

Change, good or bad, has always been difficult. If you’ve been on Facebook for awhile, you know that they occasionally make major changes that some users love and others hate. It seems the initial shock of change is what puts people off. They adjust to the way things are, and then all of the sudden it is something different. However, in most cases, after a couple of weeks, most people adjust to the new and have a hard time even remembering how things used to be. Looking back, we didn’t use to have a news feed, we didn’t have a wall. Those changes caused much angst as well.

The new news feed

So, here is what Facebook is saying about the new news feed:

Starting today, it will be easier to keep up with the people in your life no matter how frequently or infrequently you’re on Facebook.

News Feed: See What Matters at the Top

When you pick up a newspaper after not reading it for a week, the front page quickly clues you into the most interesting stories. In the past, News Feed hasn’t worked like that.  Updates slide down in chronological order so it’s tough to zero in on what matters most.

Now, News Feed will act more like your own personal newspaper. You won’t have to worry about missing important stuff. All your news will be in a single stream with the most interesting stories featured at the top. If you haven’t visited Facebook for a while, the first things you’ll see are top photos and statuses posted while you’ve been away. They’re marked with an easy-to-spot blue corner.

If you check Facebook more frequently, you’ll see the most recent stories first. Photos will also be bigger and easier to enjoy while you’re scrolling through.

News Feed often has a time lag. Usually when you’re on Facebook, a lot of your friends are too. Until now, there hasn’t been an easy way to see and chat with your friends about photos, articles, and other things they’re posting in real-time. The new ticker helps you do just that.

Ticker shows you the same stuff you were already seeing on Facebook, but it brings your conversations to life by displaying updates instantaneously. Now when a friend comments, asks a question or shares something like a check in, you’ll be able to join the conversation right away. Click on anything in ticker to see the full story and chime in – without losing your place. See more from this article here.

It takes time

It takes a little time to adjust. I think Facebook is not always the best about how they roll out changes. I think they are kind of using the “pulling off the band-aid” approach – do it all at once and get the pain over with. The profound changes that are promised today are dreaded by some and eagerly awaited by others. I’ll be here watching for the changes and then trying to see how to best leverage them to help you continue using Facebook to build relationships and reach your target market. Stay tuned.

Download the current Facebook 101 for Business eBook and you will be notified in advance when the new, revised and expanded version is available that will include information about all the changes that are happening right now!

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Facebook lists are a great way to control who sees what you post and how you interact with them. If you haven’t used the Facebook list functionality, you have missed one of the great Facebook features. Last week, Facebook changed the way lists are created and introduced “smart lists.”  According to Facebook:

Managing lists is boring. That’s why smart lists do the work for you. To start, we’ll offer you smart lists for:

• Work
• School
• Family
• City

For instance, if you list Boston College as a school you’ve attended and your friends John and Sarah do too, then you would instantly have a smart list called “Boston College” with John and Sarah on it. This means that if you’re having a grad party or a college reunion, you can easily share photos with just your college friends, without bothering other people you know.

You can also add or remove friends manually to make the lists even more accurate.

Okay, so if you haven’t made lists before, this is a helpful tool to get started. However, the functionality is so limited, I’m not too sure how “smart” it is. The problem with the new smart lists is that they offer lists for only your work, school, city, and family. You cannot search for people outside your own lists. For instance, we have several clients from other cities. It is sometimes helpful for me to see what is being posted by my friends in a particular city. I have set up lists of my friends in some of those cities. Facebook made that easy because I could search by current city (other than my own current city) and then add the people to the list for each city I chose.

With the “smart” lists, I cannot search for people in other cities. The smart lists shows me people who are within 10 miles of my current city only. That is fine for adding people to my list of people in my current city, but does not help me at all when I want to make lists of people in other cities. This is also the case for work, school and family.

Because Facebook had this functionality and then took it away with this latest update, my hope is that they will add it back at some time. Judging by the feedback on the Facebook page, there is a lot of “dislike” for how Facebook is now doing lists.

Let me add a caveat. I appreciate that Facebook is trying to make lists easier. The bigger your friend list, the more cumbersome it is to get lists organized. This could be a great update if it they will extend it to include searches that they included in the past (and maybe even add to that).

Do you use lists? What do you think?

Keep up to date with what is going on with Facebook and lots of other information that can help you with marketing your business online by subscribing to the Wharton Internet Marketing Blog.  You can sign up over to the right!

By the way, there is a new Facebook for Business 101 eBook in the works. Just letting Facebook get settled down a bit before release. Stay tuned!

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So, I wrote on Wednesday morning about some of Facebook’s recent changes. Of course, Wednesday afternoon, they rolled out some really game-changing changes that have created a lot of buzz. The big change is the subscribe button. We’ll get to that, but first let’s look at a couple of the other changes that they have made that I like:

1. You no longer have to have 25 fans for your page to get a vanity URL. Now, you can put up your page and get your vanity URL all at once. This makes it easier for businesses to immediately start promoting their page. If you don’t have your vanity URL yet, just go to facebook.com/username and get it.
2. The navigation is fixed at the top right of the page. In the past, to go from profile to news feed and to account settings, you had to scroll to the top to get to the navigation. Now it is fixed to stay at the top. Just a little added convenience. I think I would like to see that for the links at the bottom of the page as well. What do you think?

Now for the biggie: the SUBSCRIBE button. According to the Facebook blog, you can use the subscribe button to do three things.

1. Choose What You See in News FeedYou’re already getting your friends’ posts in News Feed. With the Subscribed button, you can choose how much you see from them:
   • All updates: Everything your friend posts
   • Most updates: The amount you’d normally see
   • Important updates only: Just highlights, like a new job or move

   You can also decide what types of updates you see. For example, you could see just photos from one friend, no stories about games from another, and nothing at all from someone else.

2. Subscribe to Interesting PeopleThe Subscribe button also lets you hear from interesting people you’re not friends with—like journalists, artists and political figures.If you see a Subscribe button on your favorite blogger’s profile, this means you can subscribe. Just click the button to get their public updates right in your News Feed.
3. Get Your Own SubscribersIf you’d like to share your public updates with more than just friends, you can get a Subscribe button on your profile, too. People who subscribe to you will get posts you set as “Public” in their News Feeds. This is an entirely optional feature – you need to opt in.To let people subscribe, go to the Subscriptions Page and click Allow Subscribers.

   Once you allow subscribers, you can decide who can comment and what notifications you get. You’ll also see a Subscribers tab on your profile, where you can see who subscribes to you.

So, the subscribe button allows you to follow and be followed in a way that is similar to Twitter. Of course, as a business, you still need to have a business page (not a profile – that is still a no-no). But the subscribe button presents some interesting opportunities and challenges for the way people in business use their profile.

If you are using your profile to build relationships and engage with people who may be in your target market, the subscribe button can open your profile up to a whole new set of people. Of course, you will need to control what is public on your posts. The challenge is that people can selectively choose not to see what you are saying. Now you have to really put the best inbound marketing practices in to place. Remember, inbound marketing is not about interrupting people or jumping up and down to get their attention. It is about creating interesting content that solves a problem for your customer and then being there when they are looking for you.

Looks like it is time to put out a 2nd edition of the Facebook for Business 101 eBook. It also looks like business now, more than ever need to embrace inbound marketing to continue to grow.

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Recently Facebook has been making some changes. Last week we discussed changes for local businesses. A lot of the other changes involve moving privacy controls inline so they are more easily accessible. Honestly, a lot of what has been done is just moving things around and changing some of the language. Facebook says, “these details relate to the controls and settings you use to manage who can see your posts. Nothing has changed about who can see what you’ve already posted and no one new can see a post today who couldn’t before.” The details some of the changes are outlined in this article from Facebook.

Some time ago, I posted step-by-step instructions for creating lists. If you haven’t been using lists, you need to check out this feature and use it. It is a great tool for people who use Facebook to communicate with different types of people such as friends, family and business acquaintances. Lists aren’t new, but they can be difficult to manage.

This week, Facebook has been making some changes to friends lists. Here is a list of improvements to the friends lists:

• Smart lists – You’ll see smart lists that create themselves and stay up-to-date based on profile info your friends have in common with you–like your work, school, family and city.
• Close Friends and Acquaintances lists – You can see your best friends’ photos and posts in one place, and see less from people you’re not as close to.
• Better suggestions – You can add the right friends to your lists without a lot of effort.

Also new is what Facebook is doing with notifications. They have been testing cutting down on notifications. They say this feature is for very active users of Facebook. In an email from Facebook, they say:

We’re trying out a new feature to reduce the amount of email you receive from Facebook. Starting today, we are turning off most individual email notifications and instead, we’ll send you a summary only if there are popular stories you may have missed.
You can turn individual emails back on and restore all your original settings at any time.

Page owners who want to engage in conversations with their fans may want to continue receiving notifications of posts to their page. To continue receiving notification at the time of the post, page owners will need to turn this back on. To do this, you can go to account -> account settings -> notifications (on the left side of the page). Uncheck the email frequency box.

Then go to notifications and turn them on and off as desired. Turning this feature off will also affect how you receive notifications about your profile as well so you be sure to look at all of the settings.

Happy Facebooking! If you want to learn more about how to use Facebook for your business, download the Facebook for Business 101 eBook and don’t forget to subscribe to the Wharton Internet Marketing blog to get updates to what is going on with Facebook, as well as information about how to use Facebook and other social media and internet opportunities to grow your business!

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This morning, Mashable published an article that discusses how Facebook page admins can hijack the pages from the original owners. We have talked about this before with the strong caution of “Be careful who you appoint as admin.” As far as I know, this has always been the case. Whoever creates the page can add other admins who can then delete them as the admin. What I didn’t realize is that the Facebook FAQ’s erroneously state that the original creator cannot be removed as admin.

I have mixed feelings about the deleting of the page creator as an admin issue. I create many Facebook pages for businesses. That is one of the services that we offer. We create specialty landing pages and can even post status updates for companies who need that type of service. When I provide this service, I always add the business owner as an admin. I make sure that any other admins that are added are ones that the business owner trusts to not hijack the page or do other damage to the brand. Also, if something were to happen to me, someone else needs to be able to take over. They also need to be able to remove me as an admin if they choose. Makes sense.

On the other hand, let’s say that the page creator is the actual business owner. The business owner appoints an employee to keep the page up to date. The employee leaves for one reason or another and decides to delete the business owner as the admin. In that case, it is not good that the employee is able to hijack the page. This happens all the time and, unfortunately, Facebook is not great at helping these issues get solved.

Another issue is that once someone is an admin, they can assign other admins, ones that you may not approve. I have seen this happen to a friend. She assigned someone she thought was a friend to be an admin. That “friend” then assigned someone else as an admin. That additional admin hijacked her page.

Obviously, there are two sides to this argument, and the arguments on both sides are good ones. I think you have to go back to using common sense. Do your due diligence on knowing who you can trust. One suggestion was to have everyone who is an admin (including the original creator) be required to sign in with a company email. The thought behind that is that you can always go back to the email and get access to the page. However, if you are using a social media consultant, such as me, I sign in with my own email and have over 50 pages that I administer. By signing in as myself, I am able to access all of the pages under that one account.

Fortunately, I have been doing this a while and have built a strong trust reputation. I am always glad for businesses to check out what work I have done. In fact, I think they would be crazy if they didn’t do a little research. This is a tough call for Facebook. What do you think?

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