And BTW Higher Ed, Facebook’s Changing Again

Tony Zanders

Unlike previous major updates to Facebook, they are showing progress in terms of updating users of major changes and releases before they take place to allow people to prepare. This is a practice that every service provider should aspire to master. And at Inigral, we’ve taken some cues from the team at Facebook ourselves in terms of keeping our community up to date. This time around, Facebook has some exciting things in the pipeline.

Facebook Launches “Community Pages”

As Facebook explains it, Community Pages solve the problem of unofficial pages popping up that represent a certain idea or brand. But you know, like the pages for “I like sleeping on the rooftop during the summer time in the rain with no alarm,” or something. Well, Facebook’s Pages team will take over the ownership of a page once it reaches a substantial number of fans (what they call “thousands”).

Facebook in College Admissions: Community Pages

We don’t know what it means quite yet for Facebook to take over ownership over a brand’s page, neither are we sure that it’s a good thing, especially for college and university Pages. What we do know however is that Facebook is thinking about the issue of authenticity and branding in terms of their very low barrier to entry for Group and Page creation. We’re still hashing out our thoughts about what this means for higher ed, and in comparison to normal Pages and Groups. You can read more about Community Pages from All Facebook here.

Facebook to Launch Facebook Email

According to TechCrunch, Facebook is planning to launch it’s own Email service, internally called  ”Project Titan,” and metaphorically referred to as, “The Gmail Killer”. The most notable information that TechCrunch is claiming at this point has to do with the users’ email addresses:

First, our understanding is that there will be full POP/IMAP support, meaning users can access the account other than through Facebook itself. Your email account name will be your vanity url – vanityurl@facebook.com.

Not too many other details have been released about the project, but we’re hoping to learn more about it at this year’s f8 conference. Another vote of confidence we have that this will grow from a project into a product, is a prediction our CTO George Deglin made about Facebook and email earlier this year.

Facebook to Launch “Relationships” Feature

There’s not much to say about this. It was an April Fools’ Joke :-)

Weekly Page Statistics

Most Facebook Page administrators have already noticed that weekly stat updates are being emailed to help increase engagement with Page management, and also to help upsell Page administrators to purchase more Facebook ads to promote their Pages. This says that Facebook is thinking in the right direction in terms of providing Page administrators with more relevant statistics, but there always seems to be a gap for statistics that are relevant to higher ed departments like Admissions, Student Life, or Marketing.

The three data points are:

1. Growth: Number of new fans your Page acquired that week
2. Engagement: Number of interactions your Page acquired that week
3. Traffic: Number of visits your Page had that week