There have been extreme reactions to Facebook Timeline changes. For instance, a post by media expert Zack Whittaker (A ‘stalker’s paradise’ – Mass exodus on the way?) concludes that Facebook’s new feature could be the nail in the coffin in an ever-growing pressure of privacy issues to hit the networking site. However, brands are more likely to gain in terms of user engagement. Let us look into both these aspects.
Fresh privacy concerns
Though individual privacy settings have not undergone a change on individual postings, statuses, photo uploads etc, most other documented additions to content are to resurface for every user having a Facebook profile. But now the social network has literally opted to time-line each & every interaction – photo, status, shared content, and ‘likes’- we’ve made on it in a chronological and clickable form. So, your friends can see your dated posts wrote in the past by clicking back to a specific date in the timeline’s right-hand floating menu. The writer mentions:
“The Timeline is in effect, the new Facebook ‘profile’. As you would expect, it is a timeline of your status updates and content uploads on Facebook, with an added twist: It goes as far back as your birth, if you want it to, and allows you to update life changing events in retrospect. In effect, Facebook has made ’stalking’ just that bit easier. If people are either confused or astounded by the content they thought was once gone, only to reappear again, it will lead to ‘panic moves’. The immediate reaction will be of disbelief, concern that their past has come back to haunt them, and it will result in a deactivation to block all content from appearing again.”
Impact on brand engagement
Conversely, there can be immense benefits of new Timeline changes for brands, as the same will allow them to tell a more authentic and engaging story, so they should be elated over the changes to Facebook though the networking site has not yet officially confirmed that all brand pages would employ Timeline.
While conversations on the social platform still matter, quality content and relevant information have become that much more prominent in the new Timeline design. The lifespan of all brand interactions will prolong owing to the infinite scroll, giving readers more scope to engage and consume it.
This will obviously lead to more (meaningful) chatter, and the focus, more importantly, will be on quality instead of just quantity of posts since they don’t get buried ‘below the fold’ of the Facebook wall. The focus now shifts to sharing content and not simply building conversation, so a Facebook brand page will have to orient itself to more of storytelling and not just selling. In essence, the contexts and contours of brand interactions are likely to change on the social site.
