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Businesses vs. User Base
Early last week the developers at Facebook began releasing several new sharing options for users based on privacy controls similar in concept to Google Plus’ Circles concept. Whether or not the change was already planned (Facebook product manager Kate O’Neil told VentureBeat it had been in development for 6 months) or done in reaction to the competition will likely be speculated on by both sides for some time, but the important takeaway is that Facebook is evolving (and quickly).
Among the new features, Facebook now allows users greater control over “tagging” in both posts and photos including options to approve, deny, remove and altogether block a tag. In addition users can now take advantage of the platform’s “inline audience selector” to share updates with a specific selection of friends or custom groups (circles?) instead of everything being public. Likewise, Pages can choose to share updates with only certain groups – currently limited to Location and Language.
So what does this mean for businesses seeking better social media engagement through Facebook?
It won’t make it any easier, that’s for sure. While marketers can still offer valuable content for users to share, those same users may now choose to share it with only 20 friends instead of 200. Granted, these 20 friends may be more engaged than the others, but the features could severely restrict a business’ reach (not to mention making it harder to track). With Google+ now emerging as a viable competitor, Facebook seems less concerned with businesses (at least momentarily) and more concentrated on not losing their user base. After all, no users is bad for business.
