How do Facebook's New Privacy Settings Affect Brands?
On Tuesday, Facebook announced some big changes to sharing. After years of complaints from users and privacy advocate groups, Facebook will be streamlining privacy controls for updates, clarifying what audience a user's updates are going to.
This is a big change for users, but what does this mean for brands and companies?
One of the biggest changes is a shift in one word. Previously, when a Facebook user shared something to the entire internet, the setting was called "Everyone." While some users assumed that updates marked "Everyone" were going out publicly, many users were and remain unclear about what everyone meant.
Soon, "Everyone" will change to "Public." It's a one word change, but it's a huge difference that tells people what you're sharing is going out beyond Facebook.
This will impact social media monitoring for Facebook. We can only search and monitor what Facebook users post publicly, so this data set could probably become more limited as users realize the difference and change their sharing settings. This would be detrimental towards finding individual users' thoughts and comments for feedback and outreach.
On the other hand, it could have the opposite effect and users could share more, feeling comfortable in what they are sharing publicly versus what they share privately. Also, updates to brand and company pages will remain public, so we can still gain insight about what companies are posting about themselves and how they are engaging their fans.
Another difference is that the Places feature, which allowed Facebook users to check in where they are, will be eliminated. User's will be able to add a location to their posts, but the elimination of Places means the elimination of location based deals for retailers. Watch for location-based social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla to take advantage of this new opening in this space as the 700 million member gorilla bows out.
Overall though, I think these changes are good steps for Facebook to take. While the changes have some immediate implications for monitoring and the elimination of the Places feature, the increased privacy will provide security that users are sharing with the audiences they select. That increased control brings increased incentive to share.
And the real power of going viral on Facebook is getting users to share.
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