4 Facebook Timeline Features You Should Learn Now

Welcomed by morepositive reviews than the typical site upgrade gets, Facebook’s new timeline profile makes it feel as though Christmas came early to its over 800 million active users.

Tucked away into Facebook’s timeline profile design are various submenus that all unlock hidden treasures.

These features, although not the shining stars of the new design upgrade, are worth noting and raving about, too.

Check out these four features you’ve probably yet to fully discover, but most likely will love.

Activity Log

This feature is only visible to the profile owner and makes it easier to find content for publishing or hiding on the timeline.

Facebook lets you feature old posts on timeline, or to even delete them. For most of my posts dating back to ’08, let’s just say I chose the latter.

View As

Although it became available before timeline, “view as” has gained a lot more meaning and relevance with the newest profile.

To the right of the activity log button, there’s an arrow icon that you can click on for a small drop-down menu, and “view as” is the first thing listed in the pull-down.

This feature allows users to view their timeline as if they were one of their friends, subscribers or the public. Long gone are the days you have to log in to another person’s profile — or worse create a fake account, which violates Facebook’s rules — to view your own profile to confirm that your privacy settings are indeed correct.

Life Events

Facebook’s little red heart symbolizing a new relationship is familiar to all; what isn’t so familiar yet is the briefcase, house, apple and flag, all of which appear within pull-down menu that comes from clicking on that book icon labeled “life events.” It’s above the status update field, to the right of the link for tagging a place.

Whether you lost 10 pounds before the new year or you gained a furry roommate, Facebook’s life events serve as profile mementos to all your life’s past milestones, occasions or incidents — happy or sad.

Like scrapbooking, this feature most likely won’t become a huge overnight trend, but it is fun for reminiscers and date-loggers such as myself.

Maps

Maps is Facebook’s new feature which allows users to see in map view all the places they’ve previously checked into through places. Visually, the map is undeniably cool, but whatmakes it stand out is the ability to backlog the places you have been, as well as easily and quickly tag existing photos with locations.

Readers, what have you discovered about timeline so far?

Facebook May Extend Negative Feedback Metrics Pagewide

Facebook continues to emphasize the negative in its insights for page managers, which could be a positive for marketers.

Wise reports that the social network may extend the negative feedback metrics that it launched earlier this month for individual posts throughout pages.

Should this happen, page managers will be able to see how many users still like their pages but have elected to hide posts.

This will help determine their next course of action to try to win back the attention of those so-called fans, and it will allow them to gauge how effective (or ineffective, as it may be) their content has been.

Plus, as Wise points out, emphasizing the negative could also be a positive for Facebook, as marketers may turn to advertising on the social network to try to reach users who have hidden their posts.

Facebook had first introduced negative feedback metrics for individual posts earlier this month; clearly, this measurement is popular with administrators if Facebook is considering doing this on an pagewide basis.

Facebook Sponsored Stories Debut In News Feeds 2012

Facebook’s sponsored stories advertisements will start appearing in the news feed beginning next month.

These promotions that refrain users’ engagement with a brand until recently appeared only in modules specifically designated for advertisements.

This fall, Facebook started moving sponsored stories through the ticker, and so far, labeling appears to have prevented people from confusing the promotions with activities generated by friends.

Ben and Jerry’s has signed up to become the first advertiser to run sponsored stories in people’s news feeds starting next month.

The introduction of sponsored stories in the news feed next month will mark the first time Facebook has incorporated advertisements in this space since 2007 — that was beacon, which had backfired for reasons of privacy.

Some might argue that many of the same privacy problems besetting Beacon are creeping back to the site, just in time to cause problems for sponsored stories joining the main news feed.

However, our peer blog inside facebook says it expects that sponsored stories in the main news feed ought to enjoy strong clickthrough rates by virtue of more targeted placement among viewers receptive to the content.

Already sponsored stories have demonstrated clickthrough rates 46 percent higher than all other types of ads on Facebook, amounting to the most cost effective form of promotion on the social network.

Facebook currently offers seven different variations on sponsored stories, although the ones that refrain likes have been the most popular sp far.

Readers, how do you think sponsored stories will fare in the main news feeds on Facebook?

How To Gain And Lose Facebook Friends: Infographic

The best way to add Facebook friends? Actually knowing the people helps. The quickest way to lose Facebook friends? Offensive comments.

Those were the findings of a survey of 1,865 Facebook users by Nielsen McKinsey’s NM Incite unit, which also cited solicitation comments, depressing comments, too many friends, and updating too much or too little as reasons for defriending.

Readers: Have you ever defriended someone on Facebook, and was it for the reasons below?

*Methodology: NM Incite, State of Social Media Survey (April 2011). NM Incite’s ‘State of Social Media Survey’ is based on a representative sample of 1,865 adult (18+) social media users who were recruited from the Nielsen Online Panel to take an online survey. “Social media user” is defined as participating, talking, and networking online through various platforms to share information and resources. This includes Internet forums, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, video sharing, consumer rating and other social networking websites. The survey fielded from Sep 31 to Dec 14th.