So Facebook announced some upcoming changes it’s making to its social network. The concern around the changes have to do mostly with the news feeds that grace every user’s profile, and the amount of information Facebook will be sharing with advertisers.
The new changes include giving paying advertisers more data on users via conversation tracking. That’s right. Just like brand managers already do on Twitter, likely for less money. While Facebook insists that any information shared with advertisers will be anonymized, the preservation of users’ privacy is still going to be a hot topic of conversation.
Facebook has already dealt with some issues surrounding the amount of data advertisers receive on users. A program the company launched called Facebook Beacon was an experiment in data-sharing gone awry. Yet ongoing changes to Facebook’s privacy settings and the way in which data is pushed through news feeds have helped ease consumers into a position where they’re more comfortable with sharing different kinds of information with each other.
That’s where they get you. According to Facebook, public profile information can by default going to be given up to advertisers and indexed for search engines. That could look like significantly more data-sharing than Facebook is already doing, from the consumer perspective at least.
Having the trend established on Twitter also helped Facebook push the new changes through. Not only has Twitter’s public format given way to marketer’s paradise, but it has Forced Facbook to respond in a like manner in order to maintain a competitive relationship with the microblogging platform.
Facebook Connect’s own platform has also helped forge a path for the latest changes at the company, extending a convenient channel for two-way distribution between Facebook and third party sites. This waterway of conversation on any major platform presents a unique opportunity for advertisers, and it would be silly of Facebook to not take advantage of warming attitudes towards information-sharing.
The application platform that Facebook has also helped stablish will be an interesting way in which the new changes manifest for users, advertisers, developers and Facebook itself. Similar to Facebook Connect, the applications on Facebook have a direct access point to users’ news feed. Increasing the amount of data Facebook shares from its users’ news feed could ultimately benefit application developers and publishers as well. This could be an interesting opportunity for developers, especially after Facebook hinted at further limiting developers’ access to users with the removal of application alerts in the notifications.