It goes without saying that Facebook has been changing A LOT lately. From home-page layout to the way things function and changing privacy policies. We’re all experiencing the changes and we’re all having to deal with them. For those of you up in protest about the changes, consider how much you’re actually paying to use the network. Nothing! Nada. Zip. Zilch.
The Challenge:
The idea is simple here. Learn as much about Facebook as possible in a 30 day period. Twitter has always been my preferred method of sharing and engaging. Blogging has always been my homebase. Not to discount Facebook or anything, just personal preference I suppose. The process will be a path of learning and discovery for me and by sharing my findings here, hopefully we’ll learn a thing or two together.
What we’ll cover? Everything from:
- News Feed,
- Profile & Privacy Settings,
- Friend’s Lists,
- Pages & Community Pages,
- Facebook Page Insights,
- RSS Feeds & Notes,
- Applications (things like Static FBML, Networked Blogs, and more),
If I find something interesting, I’ll blog about it. If you have a question, I’ll create a tutorial like I did for adding custom tabs to your Facebook Page.
How do you do it? What works for you? Do you think the benefits of Facebook outweigh the drawbacks (mainly all of the changes)?
The privacy settings CAN be a nuisance. To say the least. That said, Facebook's benefits so far outweigh its detriments (at least for me) that it's just one of those things I'm willing to deal with. Both personally and professionally, Facebook has been a boon for me.
Each of the social networks has its own feel. I love Twitter and get just as much enjoyment out of it as I do Facebook … it's just different. Many people pooh-pooh Facebook because Twitter is where the “cool kids” hang out; it's generally a more technologically savvy crowd, but I think they're missing out. As it's said with every one of the social networks, you get out of it what you put in. If you give Facebook half a chance, I'm sure you'll dig it. 🙂
I always like to tell people, rather than approaching things with the 'Agenda' mentality or the 'WIIFM' (What's In It For Me), choose a network that you're comfortable with and connect with your peers and friends. For some, that means Twitter, for others it means Facebook, and for yet another group, it's the calm professionalism of a network like LinkedIn (and that's enough for them). If anything comes of it, great. If not, then maybe you're just forcing it too much.
Thanks for the great comment Melissa and for sharing some thoughts!