Tinker Tailor Facebook Timeline
Posted: Thursday 31 May, 2012
Cassie Oshea
Dear Facebook page administrator, don’t fret. You are not finally losing your mind. The developers of the social network have yet again made subtle changes to Timeline, quietly behind-the-scenes without any hullabaloo. Sometime earlier this week, engineers slipped into Timeline under the cloak of virtual darkness and added some very interesting new functions.
Now, when admins view a page’s Timeline, they will see new statistics added to each post. Once regulated to the confines of the Insight tool, viewer data can now be accessed quickly and directly from Timeline. Every post will have the numbers of views listed below, with expandable windows that offer further granularity. One click on the overall number of views for a post will reveal the exact numbers of organic views versus viral views. This can be particularly useful for examining how often different posts are seen as shared content elsewhere on the network. Additionally, clicking on the percentage will reveal the proportion of a page’s fans that have seen the specific post.
(Images from Inside Facebook)
As with any Facebook change, especially the unannounced ones, wild speculation has spread across the digital world. Many say that this is a belated response to Facebook’s admission earlier this year that, on average, only 16% of a page’s fans view content posted by pages on a weekly basis. Now that Facebook is a public company, it is under more pressure than ever to be profitable, and statistics like these are not particularly encouraging for brands. Forbes recently posted an interesting opinion piece suggesting that Facebook is trying to make advertising on the platform more attractive in response to the huge loss of General Motors’ advertising campaign, which was estimated to be worth $10 million. The article points out that by showing the low percentage of post views, Facebook is shrewdly positioning its promotion tools, Sponsored Stories and Reach Generator, as attractive options for brands to pay for more views.
For more information about these new Facebook developments, check out our full report here: http://bit.ly/punchSMI-FB-Update-May-2012
Also, breaking news has just surfaced about even more new changes, so stay tuned!
