If you’re a brand or advertiser, you might well be rethinking your presence on Facebook. Given the public backlash over privacy, will the muck currently flying around stick partially to your brand?
Unlikely, unless your company happens to campaign around open source/privacy issues. In which case, you’ll be wanting to head to the start-up/upstart Diaspora. But the ‘exodus‘ planned by Facebook users failed, showing that it still holds a valuable captive audience, for better or worse (or till a prettier, younger platform comes along). But Facebook’s privacy policy is confusing. Really confusing. Trying to track how it’s changed over time is a nightmare for the average Googler (me), though the Electronic Frontier Foundation have done a nice topline timeline. And so most users don’t actually know how much they’re giving away or what their default privacy settings are. Pete Robins at the Guardian runs through the new changes and what they look like.
How does this affect anyone on the other side – anyone running a fan page for their brand on Facebook, whether a small company or a multinational corporation
Here’s the good news – if you’re a brand just happily running your own page on Facebook then the privacy changes barely affect you. If anything, I’m a little surprised no one’s really mentioned how if you are running a brand fan page, you can happily stalk through your fans’ photos, personal information and interests if they stick to the new ‘recommended settings’ option on Facebook. Of course it’s not just uniquely a brand who could look through that with the new settings. Anyone could. But people do seem to forget it’s not just future friends/lovers/in-laws who might look at their information.
One small modification is that Pages no longer display publicly on user profiles by default, after mass outrage. So if I ‘liked’ your brand page but wanted to hide it from my profile, I now have that option. To some extent, that reduces your page’s visibility to my friends BUT if I comment or like anything, that still appears in my friends’ newsfeed. I’d argue that dynamic visibility is more important.
Thinking of quitting Facebook? Have I missed something? Drop me a comment below.
