Facebook S.W.O.T Part 3 - Opportunities

This is part 3 of a four part series that explores the new look facebook and examines it using a S.W.O.T analysis

Part 1 - Strengths

Part 2 - Weaknesses

Part 3 - Opportunities

Part 4 - Threats

A Great Place To Network

Regardless of the changes facebook is still a fantastic place to network and share information with your friends. You can make valuable business contacts just as easily as before and you can use facebook to promote yourself, your business, your product or any services you offer .The strategies that you need to adopt are generally the same and you still need to avoid certain practices, for more information check out my facebook made easy guide

Facebook Pages

Facebook pages have become somewhat easier to find as they are now appearing in the search box with a little yellow flag on them. With the obvious refocus on advertising those who learn how to use facebooks social adds will have a great opportunity to get very targeted advertising.

Marketing Tools

Facebook has a range of powerful marketing tools like polls and surveys that you can use relatively cheaply to test your markets before investing too much time and energy into a project. With all the demographic data they have collected they will be set to compete with google as they know everything about all their users likes, dislikes and online habits.

Integration With Other Services

Facebook recently announced what they call facebook connect this allows users to link all their social media activities together sites like Digg . For more info check out this recent article on techcrunch . In the future they will all flow seamlessly together and your friends will follow you regardless of what site you are on. This will really unleash the full power of Web 3.0 and will make the internet a much more Tribal place. Knowing this smart marketers and business people will be positioning themselves to serve these communities not as an outsider looking in but as a full member and participant. This forces even greater transparency and also a higher quality of service. Poor products and bad services will quickly be exposed because of the power of word of mouth. Scammers and con artists can also quickly be excluded from these types of networks. The Cream will naturally rise to the top and peoples identities will be more determined by the communities and tribes that they belong to.

Power structures will Change

As facebook matures the structures of power will change. People who are within your network are not all equal in the strictest sense. Those people who have popularity, or large networks and groups have a much greater viral visibility and influence. Their messages, thoughts and Ideas will spread further because they have the structures in place to do this. With so much information available the normal person will pick a few people to follow who will act as their filters. They will follow their recommendations and trust that they will inform them of the latest changes and strategies that they need to adopt and keep them updated with the latest news and gossip. Malcolm Gladwell terms these people Connectors, Mavens and Salespeople in his excellent book the tipping point.I will be exploring these concepts in much more detail in a later post.

Facebook is clearly going to be a major player in the social media world of the future. There are huge opportunities available to those who know how to take advantage of them.

I would appreciate your comments and your views about any other opportunites and potentials that I have ommited in relation to the future of Facebook. Participation is an integral part of social media so feel free to add your voice.

Part 1 - Strengths

Part 2 - Weaknesses

Part 3 - Opportunities

Part 4 - Threats

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Facebook S.W.O.T Part 2 - Weaknesses

This is part 2 of a four part series that explores the new look Facebook and examines it using a S.W.O.T analysis

Part 1 - Strengths

Part 2 - Weaknesses

Part 3 - Opportunities

Part 4 - Threats

Vista or XP

Some users have made the comparison that the new look facebook is like using windows Vista, it looks fancy but its full of bugs and problems that still need ironing out. I was quite surprised that I found so many obvious issues that hadn't been solved and also many omissions and functions that had apparently been taken away. It makes me wonder how the beta test group hadn't picked up on them and what sort of demographics they chose for this test group (100,000 college kids???) I also wonder if facebook actually listen to feedback from their users. I should maybe apologise for the rather strong language that I included when I posted my initial feedback after my first 4 hours of frustration on the new platform.

Initial Teething Problems

I was reminded by one comment I read on the facebook page that in the early days people could go and change things on other peoples walls and even delete things on other peoples profiles. Maybe I should just have a bit more patience and not be so quick to criticise. I have also found that a lot of things have been moved around so you need to go and find them again. Mari Smith has made some great camtasia videos that take you through the new look profile, you can check them out on her fan page

Harder To Customise

While researching for this blog post I spent a long time reading all the comments and complaints on the facebook group page. From this I gathered that a lot of people felt that facebook had taken away their ability to express their individuality on their profile page. By forcing everyone's profile to look almost identical. Many users had custom skins for their applications and bumper stickers, pictures and videos so their profile had become almost a work of art. Many users were furious at this forced uniformity and even went on to accuse facebook of big brother like tactics

At the time of writing almost all the applications that I would want to be show on my main page can't be sent there. Instead they are left hidden inside my boxes tab where no one will ever find them. I hope that in the future this will change

Harder To Judge by First Impressions

For business users this is a big disadvantage of the new look facebook. On the old system if you knew what you were doing you could create a very powerful presentation by combining the right types of applications. People could instantly see in a glance what type of business were in and what type of networker you are . It now takes longer to decide who you want to accept as a friend. You have to hunt around for the telltale signs that attract and also repulse. Instead of scrolling we are now forced to click around different tabs. I suspect that with time I will still able to make the same assessment within 30 seconds that I can on the old facebook. It just takes a bit of getting used to

No shortcuts on the Profile page

Facebook has removed the shortcuts menu that used o be to the left and below your profile picture. It is now relegated to a position to the right and low down on the Home Page. I used this shortcuts menu all the time to access the groups pages. Making it harder to get to places will obviously reduce the numbers of people who go there so I foresee a potential decline in group activity, especially among new users who might not even know that groups exist.

Facebook have supposedly given you the option to create your own new tab on your profile but you are limited to a few applications that they recommend. I suspect that this is just a bug right now and will be changed in the future

Viral Potential Restricted

Facebooks new look has definitely reduced some of facebooks viral potential by making things harder to find and not immediately visible. This is especially the case for 3rd party applications if you can't see them you can’t spread them so easily. A good friend who works for one of the top applications developers sent me some screen shots of how my profile was going to look 6 weeks ago. She warned me of how bad it was for application developers who have been abandoning facebook in droves. Facebook seems intent on courting the big money from major advertisers who will be utilising all that extra white space in the future.

Application Developers

Facebook applications developers have also been hit because you can no longer share you applications with friends. Admittedly this might reduce the number of forced application invites that people receive but it takes away the easy ability to share something of value. I suspect this will change as this is an important part of the facebook experience and also an integral part of some of the game applications. There were a lot of complaints about this issue on the facebook group page.

Designed for Advertising

The new profile is a much wider. Wide pages go against the natural tendencies of our foveal vision you can't take it all in in one glance, so physically it makes the design uncomfortable to use, your eyes keep jumping around all the time

The Money Spot

Facebook has switched the advertising to the right hand side of the page, clearly to take advantage of the natural tendencies of people to focus on this area of the page. Marketers have already proved by using eye tracking software and split testing that the top right of a page is where the money spot is

Flash Distractions

I also found the animated flash graphics to be very distracting . One of the reasons I have always hated MySpace was because of this. But again, tests have shown that people click on things that move more because they grab your attention. When I was using the facebook chat facility the flash banner add was running right through the chat box and to get it out of the way I was forced to scroll the page downwards. I found this very annoying.

Please feel free to comment and add any other weaknesses that you have spotted in facebooks new design. Maybe someone will take notice. I saw that since Jim Turners recent note where he commented on the missing ignore all button that it has now been reinstated. Jesse Stay an author of two books on facebook also made an interesting blog post where he explored some of the missing features, New Facebook Design Confuses Many, Obscures Feature

Part 1 - Strengths

Part 2 - Weaknesses

Part 3 - Opportunities

Part 4 - Threats

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Facebook S.W.O.T Part 1 - Strengths

Do You Love It Or Hate It?

The new look facebook has now been live for a few weeks. It rolled out across the globe at different times so depending which part of the world you live in you might have had longer to explore than others. I am assuming that by now most of you will have probably got over the initial shock and started to find your way around. Some people seem to love it, others hate it with a passion. There are many differing opinions and I wanted to give you my take on it and invite all my readers to share their own personal experiences

S.W.O.T

In this blog post I will be using a standard S.W.O.T analysis in relationship to how the new look facebook will affect people who are using social networking for business purposes and examining its Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. I will break it up into four parts to make digestion a little easier. And allow you to comment on each aspect. I hope that some of the developers and programmers take note so that facebook can be improved for all its users

Part 1 - Strengths

Part 2 - Weaknesses

Part 3 - Opportunities

Part 4 - Threats

Initial Negative Experience

I must admit that my own first experiences with it were not so pleasurable and I wrote quite a long and negative blog post about my frustrations. I decided to wait before I published and on reflection I am glad that I waited. After a week of playing around with it I now feel in a much better position to give a more balanced overview of the changes and include the benefits and not just the problems that the new design creates.

Part 1 - Strengths

Clean Layout

One of the major strengths of the new look facebook is the clean layout and the simplifying of the profile page so that when you click on a friends profile you immediately have access to their wall/news feed and can quickly see what they have been up to recently and send them a message directly.

Tabbed Browsing

The Profile has been divided up into tabs so that all your personal information is in one place and all your applications are on one tab now called boxes. For many people this has been of huge benefit. You now don't have to wait for ages for a profile to load if a friend has installed 200 applications. Overall the platform seems to be running a lot faster than it did before. Although the tabbed feature is only limited to the profile and doesn't yet extend to other areas where it is desperately needed.

Integration of Wall and Minifeed

Facebook have integrated the wall and the minifeed into one aggregated feed that takes up 70% of the space on your profile page. This major prominence is because facebook has always been designed to focus on creating and maintaining real relationships and building a sense of community. Quickly being able to know what all your friends are doing plays an important role. It has a number of settings and wall filters so you can see only posts made by yourself, others or you can see the stories that facebook has selected for you. You can edit your privacy setting to make sure you only display what you really want to the world.

Makes Sharing Even Easier

Facebook has made the sharing of videos and photos even easier with one dedicated tab and a host of new features to play around with. For more information you can check out a recent blog post facebook the unofficial guide. This clearly shows that facebook can see the future and want photo sharing, video chats and video postcards to be on their system and not on other external services like flickr, ooVoo or Skype.

New Features

Facebook have brought in a lot of new features that help to make facebook the pivotal part of your daily life. They have introduced a new blog subscription service where you can join your favourite blog and enjoy all its content without ever having to leave facebook.

Another nice feature is the ability to create a profile badge that you can place on your website or blog that can show your current status and act like a business card and pull people from outside of facebook to become your friends. To access this feature you can find a link on the bottom left of your profile page.

This still had a few bugs in when I last tested it but I am sure Facebook will iron those out pretty soon. I would also like to be able to customise what is displayed a bit more.

Facebook Notes

The Notes feature has increased in prominence, which is great because it gets more people involved in conversations. Anyone who has a blog can import their posts automatically and then tag their friends to come and make a comment. This runs straight into the wall feed and you can make comments directly on your wall/minifeed and keep updated on the topic without having to go back to the post and scroll down to the bottom each time a new person makes a comment.

I would like to hear your positive comments about the new look facebook, what you consider to be its greatest strengths and any other new features you may have discovered that you would like to share.

Part 1 - Strengths

Part 2 - Weaknesses

Part 3 - Opportunities

Part 4 - Threats

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You can find me on facebook by going to http://profile.to/ianchapman

You can also follow me on twitter - http://www.twitter.com/ian_chapman