Facebook Updates and New Features
Thursday, October 29th, 2009With over 45 million status updates every day and more than 300 million active users, Facebook has become the indisputable leader of social networking. However, maintaining this market dominance puts a large target on your back and forces the management team at Facebook to be constantly looking for new ideas to promote growth and help improve the end user’s experience. Over the last few months, we have seen some major progress.
New Facebook features and recent news:
Social media managers rejoice, you can now link your Facebook business pages with your Twitter account, so every time you post something it will be visible on both networks. In addition, Facebook has added the ability to tag friends in status updates, by utilizing the @ sign similar to Twitter. If you mention a friend in an update, put a @ sign in front of their name and it will generate a drop-down list of your friends, enabling you to quickly tag your desired friend(s) in the status update. You can do this with groups or business pages as well. Once you click the name after the @ sign, it will link you to that person’s page or the event.
Sharing content from a variety of websites, such as Mashable seen below, has always been a strength for Twitter, and a weakness for Facebook. With the new Facebook Share buttons, they have virtually eliminated this competitive advantage. Now, users can easily share an article on Facebook with the small Share button, typically located next the the Twitter Share button. Additionally, content providers can easily see how much traffic Facebook is driving to their articles through the icon. It’s a win-win situation for both the end user and the content provider.
A problem with many networks, whether its your personal friend circle or a Facebook group on the web, is the fact that they can get too big. Facebook is tackling the problem by enticing users to reconnect and engage less active users. This is significant because it’s important to recognize that inactive users are just as valuable as new users. You’ve already got them to join your network, so why not focus more on encouraging interaction instead of advertising hard on possible new users that will further increase an already massive network?
According to All Things Digital, Microsoft is set to announce deals with both Twitter and Facebook, integrating status updates into its Bing search engine. Not all status updates will be found on Bing, as Facebook will provide users with new tools in assigning specific messages for public search. All signs point to a potential deal with Google coming soon, as the race to become the dominant search engine on the block continues.
Conclusion
One thing is for sure, in the competitive industry of social networking, you can not afford to stand still, or something better will come along in a flash. For example, just think about the mind boggling growth of Twitter over the past year, and the dwindling audience of MySpace. Instead, you must always look for ways to improve your product and grow your reach throughout the web.
