Facebook: Platform Features

 Facebook structure

1. News Feed

2. Friends

3. Wall

4. Timeline

5. Likes and Reactions

6. Comments

7. Messages and inbox

8. Notifications

9. Groups

Applications

1. Events (a way for members to let friends know about upcoming events in their community and to organize social gatherings).

2. Marketplace (allowing users to post classified ads within sale, housing, and jobs categories).

3. Notes (offering users the ability to write notes, attach photos, and optionally import blog entries from external sources).

4. Places (check into Facebook using a mobile device to let a user’s friends know where they are at the moment).

5. Platform (enable third-party developers to integrate with the “open graph”, whether through applications on Facebook.com or external websites and devices).

6. Facebook Questions (facilitates short, poll-like answers in addition to long-form responses, and also links directly to relevant items in Facebook’s directory of “fan pages”).

7. Photos (upload photos, and to add them to albums).

8. Videos (upload recorded videos or livestream videos from their webcams and 360-videos).

8.1 Live streaming (appear on the News Feed, and users can comment on them in real-time).

8.2 Controversial use (not always safe and up to Facebook rules content). 

9. Facebook Paper (allows users to post statuses, photos, and “stories” to Facebook that has been described as a different, more presentation-focused design). 

10. Facebook Mentions (allows public figures with a verified account to engage with their respective fanbases in a more concentrated experience).

11. Facebook Moments (technology to group photos and let users easily share them).

12. Facebook Gaming (take on gaming livestreams where gamers and fans interact).

How to manage? 

1. Organize Your List

Open up your home news feed and under the explore tab on the left-hand side you will see a friends list. Select friends list and then add the friends into the organized categories.

The benefit is you can now see posts from those categories and you can post to the selected groups also.  Giving you content that is specific to those categories.

To organise your news feed, select news feed preference and you can choose who and what content you want to see, or remove.

2. Groups

If you haven’t looked at utilising groups as part of your marketing strategy, I would strongly coach you to consider this feature. Groups are a great way to grow a community who are interested in your product and services. Having a group allows you to connect and provide exclusive information to the members. I have been able to use groups to host my webinars and membership portals (paid groups)

A few of the new features within the groups include:

Watch Party

The ability to have a group of streaming videos for your members to view and comment on. You can share videos that are on Facebook from different pages.  You will know whether you have this function when you go to post, underneath the description box you will see ‘watch party’.

• When creating a watch party, make sure that you have the details clear so the user doesn’t get confused.
• When creating the watch party your post will look like a normal post, however, the next step will prompt you to select your videos, this is the really cool part of this feature. 

You will be able to select videos that you have seen or created yourself, they can come from the following:

Search – look for topic related videos on Facebook

Pages – choose a video from your page

Watched – select videos that you have previously watched on Facebook

Groups – select a video that you have posted in your group

Live – go live into the party

Saved – choose from your previously saved videos

Suggested – pick from a selection of videos

Units

The elearning space is to be worth USD240 billion dollars by 2023, maybe Facebook is foreseeing the use of groups as elearning platforms.  Inside the groups, we now have the feature to organise our posts, rather than have a continuous feed that can be messy. We also see this feature as a great tool for those that are creating mini-courses online, we can use the units to organise our training and learning content.

Notification to members

We now as admins of our groups have the tool to access support to Facebook by asking a question directly. If members have broken our group rules, we can notify members which rules they have broken, and add notes to the removed post. Time-saving we can now post pre-approved posts into the group from trusted members. You will be able to access these tools by tapping on the admin tools below your cover image.

Filter the content we see

As a member of a group, we can now filter the content we want to see, we can choose from being notified about all posts, posts from your friends or just the highlights. However, as an admin of your group, you would encourage your members to select all notifications. As you can see from these features, groups are becoming a great place to organise your content, notify your members and get real-time value and content that will create engagement.

Scheduled Posts

We can now schedule our content to be posted when we choose inside our Facebook Groups, exactly like our Facebook Page options. 

Facebook Group Insights

Access the group insights feature from the left hand side of the group navigation bar. The insights are going to give admins only at this stage, information about the growth of the group, engagement and membership details.

3. Messages

Bots are back – Facebook has now lifted the ban on bots, in particular, the third party application called Many Chat. With this ban lifted, we are now able to again build our list and talk to our subscribers in real time straight to their mobile devices. Messenger and Bots have an open rate of 99.9%, compared to email marketing this is a great tool to use for your business.

If you don’t have a bot or are not keen on the thought of automated messages, then think about how you can encourage your fans to chat with you on messenger. Facebook now encourages us to add the messenger button to our posts, think about what you are posting on Facebook and add a call to action to get them to message you. This allows you to converse and engage in real time with your fans.

4. Royalty Free Music

This is a great feature that has been added, we no longer must worry about the posts or videos that are uploaded to be banned from Facebook due to copyright infringement. Under your publishing tools, you will now find the sound collection. Facebook has thousands of tunes available for us to download, add to our videos and all royalty-free. 

5. Live streaming to multiple pages

A cool feature that has been added is the ability to live stream to multiple pages, called cross-promoting. In order to access this feature, you need to first go to settings, cross-posting and then select a page to promote. The benefit is that you will no longer need to share the original live post, the views will be calculated across all shared postings and you will have greater insights on the video. The cons are, the original video will not be shown on the cross-promoting page, the comments on the pages that you share will also not be visible on the original post.

6. Legacy contact

Well now Facebook has introduced the Legacy contact tab, similar to a will, we can give one of our Facebook friends permission to access our account once we have passed on. To give access to your Legacy contact, go to your settings on your personal profile and scroll down.

Death is something that none of us wants to think about, however, it would be nice for our legacy to live on and for others to see our posts, thoughts, and photos.

7. Scrapbooking

The scrapbooking feature always allows parents to create a scrapbook album for their children’s photos. The parents are the only ones who can tag their children and share the images in their scrapbook, the parents can customize the privacy settings on the photo and will be notified if a particular photo is public.

Facebook Pros

It’s easy 

Setting up a profile is a smooth process, and the relatively uncluttered UI of the site is easy to navigate and use. It’s free and all you need is an internet connection and any device that can connect to the internet, mobile phones included.

Connectivity

The first and foremost benefit of using Facebook is the unlimited connectivity it provides. Whenever any of my friends go somewhere I can’t reach them via my phone, I’ve noticed they would always resort to using Facebook.  Facebook welcomes everyone

Free and Quality communication

This is probably the most missed benefit of using Facebook. I understand there are other free social media apps as well, but Facebook has a different league. So many ways you could communicate. Send in a message , call or put a status update. Get your message across and that too for free.

Global Village of Information

If you didn’t skim through to the bullet points, you already know the vast majority of different minds zoning in on Facebook. It’s literally a giant global pool for sharing ideas, thoughts, and learning amazing new things by like-minded people.

How do you do that?

1. Join Groups (You can easily find groups that interest you, and learn and grow and share your own ideas. The DIY groups on Facebook are an absolute hit).
2. Join Communities (There was a time when communities on Facebook were dropping in numbers, but that’s going to change after the new changes discussed by Mark Zuckerberg at the Communities Summit 2017. Among many new additions, they introduced an option to sort join requests by gender!). 
3. Follow influential personalities (All celebrities are known to have a Facebook page, whether its movie actors or technology gurus. Their Facebook profiles, official ones, can tell you a lot about their life and success and activities. Wondering when Taylor swift will be releasing her new song, probably following her Facebook page will help).
4. Track your favorite companies (Join in on official company pages and groups and you can stay updated on what they are doing, the new trends they are following or setting. It was seen with 80% companies that after their official website and contact info, they would put in their Facebook page).

Facebook Live

Going live on Facebook is the next best thing. At first, this was only available for celebrities and other influential entities, but now it’s available to everyone. No need fussing over missing long distance family occasions. You can read 10 great ways to use Facebook live here.

Better for business

It has become a common and a must follow trend to market your business on Facebook. Ad campaigns are most effective because of the comprehensive audience reach and user interaction patterns and behaviors. People here are more engaging. The chances of ‘Likes’ being converted into ‘business’ are higher than any other social media platform.

Educational use

Facebook is no longer just a place to connect and share. Apart from memes and funny videos, there is great content for educational purposes. Facebook has actually evolved from being just a social media website to a content distribution platform. Scholarship networks, Live seminars, Online study groups, everything is there; you just have to find it.

Virtual Timeline

The farther we are moving with technology, the less we are moving closer to each other. Facebook identified that and it gave us a way to keep a digital journal. The ‘Your Year in Review’ shows us what we did and didn’t do. Since people post apparently everything on Facebook, with exceptions to a few, you can actually see what your life has been all about. The goals you reached for new relationships, life achievements and so much more. Looking through your life like that can be a great way to increase self worth and make new resolutions that help you grow.

Voice your opinion

Let the world hear you. If you say it right, everyone will. You feel like starting some positive movement, a new trend, some charity event, you can do that with excellent results on Facebook. As I mentioned before, people respond better on Facebook, use the right words, make a captivating video or post a thought provoking picture. Just do it right, and witness the sea of people joining in.

Personal profile branding

Your Facebook profile isn’t just for impressing the opposite gender, if you use your public posts right, you can manipulate the best impression of yourself for the whole world to see. Facebook has even added videos as display pictures! Think of the astonishing possibilities and amazing ways you could use to introduce yourself.

Facebook Cons

Privacy Leaks

Privacy has always been the biggest concern for everyone on Facebook, females primarily. Since so much of your information is out there, you are more vulnerable and susceptible to attacks like identity theft, hacked accounts and frauds. The easiness the sign up process brings, is misused to create multiple fake ids. Another thing we all know is, anything once posted online, is never gone. One way you can save yourself, is by thoroughly reading the privacy settings, as Facebook keeps changing, and making sure you know whatever you post online is on public or private.

Time consuming

So much available on one single platform, that you don’t need to scroll away to some other site, makes time feel irrelevant. Facebook is very addictive. Idle scrolling, videos, memes and what not can get you hooked for hours and hours. Worst of all, people have started substituting Facebook surfing for avoiding interaction or hiding uneasiness while communicating. You could drown in the amount of information Facebook throws at you, and miss doing something constructive with that time.

Freedom of expression

No matter our progress with technology, we as humans have not evolved emotionally to not take things too far. Anyone can say anything on Facebook and you might end up becoming the laughing stock of eternity in front of the whole world. Cyber bullying seems to be rising as one joke becomes viral and affects people so much to the point that they take their own life!

Not everything is as it seems

Our interaction is majorly based on emotional and physical cues. What a person is actually feeling is not visible through texts or emoticons. There is a high chance that you could be missing out on someone showing signs of depression and negativity.

Ads are annoying

Facebook has started adjusting ads within videos. You would be enjoying a perfectly funny video and boom! An ad comes on, no matter if the ads are small to medium in duration, but that interrupts a perfectly happy user.

Frequent updates

The irony here is that Facebook frequently updates and evolves to create better user experience, but at times they end up decreasing the user experience. It’s in our basic nature to resist change. Why? Because learning something new is hard. Facebook updated their security settings and profile view. A lot of us wouldn’t have adapted if Facebook hadn’t pinged us to adapt. Unless the updates address a massive pain point, people don’t usually follow.

Benefits of Facebook for business

• Brand awareness: Facebook is one of the largest social media platforms in the world. Your business’ presence will help you gain exposure to potential customers.
• Drive website traffic: By posting links to your website, you can help increase online visits.
• Targeted advertising: Facebook advertising allows you to target specific demographics, based on location, age, gender and interests.
• Generate business leads: Your audience of Facebook ‘likes’ can be a great starting point to gather sales leads. You can use competitions and giveaways to gather email addresses to build your marketing lists.
• Customer service and feedback: Facebook allows two-way communication between businesses and their customers. You can use the messaging service to deal directly with your customers. Reviews and comments can be a great way to gather customer feedback and find areas for improvement.
• Monitor and improve: Use data from your page’s ‘Facebook Insights’ to understand what content works best and plan for the future.

Challenges of Facebook for business

• Time and resources: Setting up and running a Facebook page requires a time investment. You may need a member of staff who can take on social media duties and have enough time to manage the page well and create engaging content.
• Skills: The staff member who manages your Facebook page may need training to ensure they have the right skills. They should be able to plan and create content, respond to enquiries and complaints, and represent your business.
• Budget: To make the most of Facebook, you will probably need to invest in paid-for advertising. This will require its own budget.
• Negative feedback: The two-way communication nature of Facebook means that unhappy customers can voice their complaints publicly. It is important to handle these complaints well as your response will be under scrutiny from your audience. It is not advised to delete genuine negative comments.