Last week at the f8 summit Facebook announced a collection of updates to their social media network. There were 4 large announcements along with the unannounced new version of the Facebook feed. As these new changes are going to effect your social media world we wanted to share them with you so you can prepare.

Over the coming weeks you can expect to start seeing these updates get put into place, don’t be too worried though, the core aspects of linking with ‘likers’ and communicating with them still remain. We will cover each change in detail however as a quick snapshot the four big changes are:

• More ‘verbs’ are coming your way: “Like”, “Comment” and “Poke” are getting friends
• SSL Certificates are now required for custom pages
• The 25 liker limit has been removed for custom URL’s
• Profiles are changing (again) and becoming Timeline’s

1. Let’s start with the changes that you have already seen.

Over the past 2 weeks the Facebook News Feed has been changing. The News Feed now includes both the Top News and Most Recent all in one combined feed with Top News identified by separators and blue triangles in the top left corner.

In addition to the new merge, photo folders now appear in a slightly different layout and related posts are now grouped together.

At the same time as publishing the new News Feed Facebook also released the ‘Ticker’, the ticker shows users what is happening in live time on the right hand side of the screen. Every like, comment, share, status etc is shown in the order that they happen and updates immediately.

In addition to these changes Facebook released ‘Smart Lists’ which help you to group together your friends by a specific characteristic. It will have automatically created a list for Close friends and family. If you are like me it will have also created a list for my workplace, the high school that I went to, my university class mates and people that live in the same suburb area as me. These lists have been created by Facebook to match in with the Google+ circles functionality and to allow users to see updates only from people that they are interested in.

The ‘ticker’ and ‘lists’ are both applicable to personal accounts only where as the changes to the News Feed and image view are applicable also to the News Feed that you see when managing your business Page.

2. More ‘verbs’ are coming your way: “Like”, “Comment” and “Poke” are getting friends

Over the coming weeks Facebook will be releasing new ‘verbs’ to their current collection of ‘Like’, ‘Comment’, ‘Share’ and ‘Poke’. Last week Facebook released their new ‘Subscribe’ functionality allowing one-way updates (just like twitter).

Over the coming weeks Facebook will also be releasing other verbs like ‘watch / watching/ viewed’, ‘listened’, ‘read’ etc to match in to actions that people complete without actually liking it.

Facebook will also be releasing other ‘verbs’ that may change the way that users interact with your business Page depending on what your products/ services are. As soon as these new ‘verbs’ are released we will be sure to update you on how they will impact your business.

3. SSL Certificates now required for custom pages

Facebook have also announced that as of the start of October all custom pages will be required to have an SSL certificate on their hosting domain.

If you currently have a custom tab on your business page we strongly advise that you check with your developer to ensure an SSL certificate is in place. For the majority of people that have created their page using a customisation service such as Pagemondo, ShortStack, Involver or North Social your page should already be hosted on a secure SSL domain, it is advisable though to check.

For any of our Custom Facebook Page clients reading your pages are on an SSL certified domain, so no worries there.

4. 25 liker limit removed for custom URLs

You no longer need the coveted 25 likers to set up a custom URL for your page. Simply create your page and head over to the ‘Basic Information’ tab within the Edit Page section to set yours up.

Remember this change is strongly advised and will cut your page URL down to www.Facebook.com/MyBusinessName. This means that you will now have a short clean URL to use on marketing, business cards or to simply mention to people once they have been a client of yours.

5. Profiles are changing (Again)

Over the next few weeks Facebook will be releasing the new version of the profile, changing it over to a timeline view showing every action, status, comment, photo, check in, like etc over the lifetime of your Facebook account. To fancy up your page you include a ‘Cover’ which is the image at the top behind your profile picture – this is supposed to represent your life.

As part of the new timeline you can add or exclude information, if you are interested in sharing your details with your friends you can add events such as ‘Got Married’, ‘Broke my leg’, ‘Went to Canada’ etc providing people more information about what has happened in your life.

The new timeline now places more emphasis on the content that used to be on your ‘wall’ and combines it with the information from your ‘info’ tab. The additional tabs are now all grouped up in a bar at the top of your timeline.

The new timeline is sortable by year / month on the right hand side and if you have your relatives linked as family it will include their ‘birth’ on your timeline.

Summing it all up

How the visual changes will effect your business is still yet to be experienced, as soon as the new features are released and verbs are updated we will update you to ensure you know how to work with them for your business to generate likers and customers.

Until then, here is your to do list…

• Business – If you have a custom page, check that you have an SSL certification
• Business – If you haven’t already set up a custom URL for your page, what are you waiting for, set one up now
• Business – Get prepared for the new verbs, once they are released rather than pushing them away think about how you can embrace them and make them part of your marketing strategy
• Personal – Welcome the new ‘timeline‘ view, set some time aside to go through and clean up your timeline to make sure you only show what you would like to

What are your thoughts on the latest Facebook updates? Are you a fan? Is it going to deter you from using it personally? let us know!

For those of you that are interested in seeing our latest Custom Facebook Designs, head over to our photo album on Facebook which will be updated each time we take a page live.