Facebook took a big step in the right direction today by announcing a set of new privacy settings. The features, which will be rolled out in the coming weeks, will give users greater privacy control, and it seems this will not come at the expense of existing functionality.
Translation: the new privacy settings are unlikely to jeopardize the efforts of brand marketers and managers using Facebook to promote their products.
The singular objective of the Facebook security enhancements has been to protect the consumer, not to impede the efforts of marketing users. Consequently, brand marketers shouldn’t be alarmed by the new privacy settings: expect little net change to your marketing operations.
According to All Facebook, five major security enhancements were announced:
1. A new button has been introduced that users can use to opt out of applications from the entire Facebook platform.
Marketing Impact: Tune your marketing activities to prevent end-user frustration. Over-solicit, and you could wind up pushing your target market to opt out of all applications. Further, it’s now imperative to deliver value in every interaction. Do so, and a frustrated user may remember that the connection to your brand is worth preserving.
2. Users can now hide their lists of friends, likely impeding fan and friend recruiting.
Marketing Impact: If you’ve been sifting through the lists of fans and friends to find more targets, it’s time for a new strategy. Brand marketers using this approach to recruit audiences, though, were overdue for a change anyway! The goal of your Facebook marketing efforts should be to trigger this behavior among your fans and friends. Design applications and develop content that users will want to spread for you.
3. Users can hide their interests, making it more difficult for you to ascertain which people would be most receptive to your brand.
Marketing Impact: There’s virtually no change as a result of this. Since interests were only released when community pages were rolled out in April, it’s unlikely that any transformative social media marketing practices had time to emerge.
4. Past status updates can be hidden, constraining brand marketer research.
Marketing Impact: This development looks more significant than it really is. Unless you’re working with a small number of highly targeted Facebook users, it’s unlikely that you’d sift through this much content. Past information is concealed from searches, which can be limiting, but it should have no impact on a referral/viral growth strategy.
5. With only one click needed, privacy is getting much easier for users.
Marketing Impact: Again, there’s virtually no impact. Facebook users can easily restrict access to “Friends Only,” “Friends of Friends,” “Recommended” or “Everyone.” Unless you’re sifting through users to find targets, which is inefficient and time- and resource-consuming, this shouldn’t change your on-platform marketing activities.
Despite the magnitude of the changes, particularly in regards to personal privacy control, brand marketers shouldn’t be impacted too severely … as long as you’re using well-planned, properly executed social media marketing practices. If you suspect the privacy changes could disrupt your Facebook marketing efforts, contact us now.
[Thanks, All Facebook]
