So what happened? I was around when it began and was someone who helped drive the hype, all of my generation adopted it and yet I know very few that still use it as much today. Is this purely because we’ve grown older, left university and thus Facebook is less interesting or we don’t have the time any more? Perhaps, but I think there are more factors at play here. Facebook has grown and done its best to provide the full “social media experience”. It now has a thriving economy supporting games and other applications, a timeline that presents users with a condensed archive of their life, facebook emails for users and much more. Some of these changes are worrying though, and they point toward a crucial misunderstanding in the way that Facebook is approaching the future of social media.

Humans are multi-faceted creatures – complex, personal and unique. There is no single interpretation of someone, we all readjust our personality to deal with varying environments. This could be from being with your parents, to being with your partner, employer, work colleague or more. We adapt the way we act, speak and present ourselves differently in each of these situations. The differences could be subtle or extreme depending on the person, which in itself highlights just how varied we all are.

Facebook largely nudges you down one path. One ‘frame’ of your personality to be permanently represented and archived. Essentially a catalogue of your interests and activities available in one space, to whomever you’ve added. This presents a problem though. If I have my parents/employer/colleague on Facebook alongside my friends, I might not want them to read certain messages or see certain pictures – and vice versa. This is somewhat accommodated for in groups but is considerable effort and is far from encouraged. Thus the simple option is I either don’t post them at all, or I force myself to only have a certain set of people as my “friends” on Facebook.

The latter of which is far from an ideal solution so the easiest route is to not post any content that might not be suitable for everyone I’m friends with. This pruning of your personality forces you down a narrowing tunnel, leaving you with a “global identity”. It’s neither a false representation of you, nor is it entirely true. Furthermore, being able to flick through someone’s entire social history should be a worrying thing for generations encouraged to make mistakes while they’re young. People of all ages are more and more being held accountable by society or the law for what they’ve posted on what was originally designed to be their personal space. From arrests for controversial language or expressions, to being fired for ‘inappropriate’ photographs you have to be more and more careful about what you show to who. Now with the timeline feature allowing ease-of-access to a persons entire Facebook history, you not only have to worry about what you’ve posted recently, but what you may have posted years prior.

Facebook wants your page to be a virtual ‘you’. People can visit it to find out who you are, what you like and where you spend your time. They’ve pushed for this for a long time yet completely ignored the fundamental truth: we are contextual. We adapt and change depending on what’s around us. Facebook is striving to put you in one place instead of recognising this aspect, and catering for it. The current option of achieving this – mainly grouping ‘friends’ with varying degrees of visibility as to your profile – is tedious and really not up to the task required. Why isn’t it easy to have multiple iterations of your wall? Varying in content depending on what’s given access, with you selecting to which walls content gets posted/applied to. Google + has come the closest to this, with its ‘circles’ system, but even that is far from intuitive off-the-bat and is poorly realised. Facebook however, is persistent in marching forwards with its vision.

Another turn-off is the encroaching reality that Facebook is a company. When it first started it felt personal. Not small necessarily, but definitely focused more on you and your friends than anything else – at least from the perspective of a user. These days it’s almost impossible to ignore being a cog in the mechanics of an extremely large machine. Adverts are plastered everywhere, your comments can be taken and used to promote colossal brands, you’re recommended to like this or that and furthermore you’ve lost your own email address – a sign of identity since the web began. Facebook has replaced all user’s emails shown on their pages with their @facebook.com address. No thank you Facebook, I don’t want to be forced to use your messaging system. Nor do I want people visiting my profile and contacting me using my Facebook email, when i don’t even log in any more. Hello? Facebook? Oh, it’s busy tidying up Graph Search. A means to find new people or products based on what your friends like/interact with. I hope I’m not going to be receiving a friend request soon, based purely on the fact that I like video gaming, James Bond and saw Skyfall in Southampton last month.

What was once the standard option for communication between friends, has become a tiresome, bloated website that seems to show little regard for its users as it marches on. From controversial design changes every year/six months with little or no transition or warning, to forcing users to use undesired aspects of the site. Will it continue to be popular? Of course. For many they have so much invested in it (photographs that are only on Facebook, conversations, emails, friends etc.) that moving to an alternate social media site is too large a task to consider. Better to shrug off the bad rather than jump ship altogether. However feeling obligated to log in and continue being social grows tiring and many people are slowly realising that life without Facebook is a lot more varied, exciting and social than with.

Facebook may not be at immediate risk of losing swathes of people, but they’re wandering down a troublesome path. Recent reports show that two-thirds of users don’t log in for weeks at a time, and that the UK site lost 600,000 users last December. Another interesting idea is that of the generational shift in Facebook users. In 2013 more and more parents are adopting Facebook, using it to find and get back in touch with their old schoolfriends, and generally spending more and more time on the website than before. This clashes with many younger users as their parents start to tread ever closer to what was once a rather sacred space for younger generations to relax without fear of Big Brother looking in (oh how times change). Although I highly doubt such an issue was the driving force behind most users leaving, I’d be surprised if we didn’t see this issue growing as time continues.

The main question to ask is whether Facebook will persist in its need for a single definition of everyone, or will it recognise that we’re a lot more complicated than is currently catered for?

Let’s not rush to condemn anything from the off though, instead let’s have a little recap on what’s happened since I last used it actively (likely around 2005). Myspace has passed through various hands and rebrands (anyone remember My______ ?) and has had one consistent problem; itself. Myspace is weighed down by its name, and has lost a lot of ground over time to other websites that have stood up and become the social media standard. The est. revenue of MySpace in 2011 was $109 million. Facebook finished the same year with total revenue of $3.71 billion. As of Oct. 2012 Facebook has over one billion users, that’s one profile for every seven people on the planet. In comparison, in June 2012 Myspace had 25 million. If you were to determine the size of a network solely by its members, Facebook could now be said to be forty times larger than Myspace. So as you can see, the divide is colossal in more than one way.

The first thing to note is that Myspace is still ‘Myspace’. Many have criticised the social network for still clinging to its name, but standing back and being objective it can’t have been an easy decision. Starting off with no name or reputation as a social network is crushing – I still haven’t heard Diaspora (check it out here, it’s a really interesting project) come up in general conversation to any degree. “Justin Timberlake’s Social Network” wouldn’t fly with the ‘now-in-their-twenties’ demographic they’re hoping to attract either, nor would “From the makers of Myspace”. So ultimately I can’t blame them; they have a name that is known and will hold some weight with the population, it’s just a shame that it brings to mind a social network that has been trying to get our attention back for the past seven years. The boy who cried wolf turned the website who cried change.

Still, there is something to strongly criticize the reboot for, something that will likely underpin the demise of what I’m sure will be the final iteration of Myspace. This is the decision to effectively shoot themselves in the foot by forcing everyone to start over if they wish to be a part of the ‘new myspace experience’. We’re not just talking about you or I, but also musicians and bands. Yes, musicians and bands – the exact community that Myspace are leaning on to make their reboot work – are forced to start over when it comes to profiles, records, photographs, fans and audience.

On the old Myspace Britney Spears has around 1.5 million friends. The new one? Under nine thousand. The results of this are already prevalent. I decided to search some of my favourite musicians both mega-famous and relatively minor, from Bonobo and Devlin to Kanye West, Jay-Z and JJAMZ. I did this for a good thirty or so artists, and have only connected to two; Lana Del Rey and Kendrick Lamaar. Why? Because they’re the only ones with a hint of activity to their profiles, and even then it’s mainly just the typical dumping old photographs already published on other social mediums. The rest had a nice, sharp, high-definition picture next to an empty profile, or no personal-profile at all. Instead a link to their music, videos and events that appears to have been generated by Myspace as opposed to each individual artist. Already the new website is fast starting to feel like a lie, as I do my best to keep browsing for something interesting. There’s definitely an illusion of activity and membership, it’s like walking past a shop with an amazing window-display, only to walk inside and there be no staff or stock. There’s a certain “ghost town” feel about it despite it now being open to the public. I don’t know anyone on there, and I’ve only logged back on to take screenshots for this thread and to show someone at work. In fact it’s been about three weeks since I last checked it, and the only activity I’ve missed it two random people from America connecting to me (presumably spreading their net wide in search of life).

These things combined with a weird sense of forced-separation between areas of the website (in particular the bizarre split between an artists ‘artist’ page and their profile page) and non-intuitive navigation have led me to completely give up on Myspace already. Which really is a shame, as I love the majority of the design direction and would honestly use it were it more active. It’s certainly trying to take social in a better direction than Facebook seems willing to..

Speaking of which, it says everything when you can sign up to the new Myspace using your Facebook account. Yes, that makes importing your content much easier but ultimately you’re just splitting networks. If you can’t even manage to separate yourself from the off, then you’re never going to go far. People choosing this option will always be one-foot-in-one-foot-out and tied to both. The new design and style is modern and clean enough to stand out from competitors, especially considering Facebook’s conservative approach to design direction, it just appears as though Myspace lacks the confidence to go it alone. It’s sad to see, but it appears as though the new iteration of this now old and battered entity is dead-on-arrival, and I don’t see a defib anywhere around.

We looked at 10 of the busiest sites we host and found an average of just below 3% of IE7 usage.. 16% IE8 and 20% IE9 usage. We tend to wait for browser usage to drop around the 1 – 2% mark before we stop supporting them which we anticipate being some time later this year as more people upgrade to Windows 8 (which only supports IE10). Google’s policy is to support only the current version of a browser and its immediate predecessor so they have stopped support for IE7 and 8, as have Facebook, so expect more of your favorite sites to follow suit.

The truth is IE7 is no where near as bad as its unruly sibling but its support for some of the newer CSS3 and HTML5 features is pretty poor which are incredibly useful in modern web development so the sooner we can move on the better.

If you are interested in finding out how your website can be updated to ensure the functionality is persistent in the future, get in touch with us to find out how we can help you.

Communication

As a business, it is hard to communicate without appearing to be selling something. Of course linking to your products or to sale events and such is okay – just so long as that’s not ALL you’re about. Funny pictures that vaguely relate to what you do are okay, just so long as you moderate it. The best thing you can do is be yourself – or rather, allow the brand to become personified and to ‘be itself’. Nothing should be forced, just let it be natural – as you would on a personal account, but from the brand or company point of view.

It’s key to have a trusted, smart and up to date member of staff on the job here. Someone with a cool head, patience and brilliant communication skills will make the perfect social media weapon. They need to be a little daring too; boring posts aren’t good for anything. But then, neither are posts that cross the line. Delegation, diplomacy and tact are good qualities to have too. But if you’re having trouble finding a former hostage negotiator or member of the UN council for the role, put the job in the safest hands around – your own.

In a place where people talk and communicate, a business needs to be seen as listening, not shouting about itself all the time. Listening to your social media audience is going to become a vital part of your digital presence and it can uncover some very interesting, often useful information about your customers and user base. So instead of sitting in the corner, shouting about 10% off something or other, invite the people who matter to talk.

Engage

Let your users ask you questions and communicate with you – give them an easy option that they are confident you will respond to, or allow them to speak their mind anonymously. You can do this with forms and many applications exist on Facebook that facilitate forms. Ask anything or let your audience ask you anything. Make in depth surveys with prize rewards. Even make forms to buy tickets for your events. There’s pretty much no limit to what you can do and forms can be as simple or complicated as they need to be.

How To Set-Up A Form – Simples

The best tool I’ve found for making forms (without coding knowledge or a stack of cash!) comes from JotForm. Besides being able to create forms for a wealth of social sites and blogging platforms, forms can integrate with your email, Google Analytics and Google Spreadsheets, letting you track and control everything that goes on within them. Plus there are tons of templates and tutorials available to help you through the process. Its free too – there are premium and professional subscriptions that give you more storage and allow more form submissions per month, but the basic package is a great place to start. There are no ads or other distractions and it all works brilliantly.

You can take the code and embed it into your website or Facebook page. The line of code is very small – the form is hosted by JotForm, but you can take the source code if you want to keep it all on your own page.

All in all, a very powerful tool indeed – we’ve already started using it to build customer enquiry forms for Facebook and we are very pleased with the results. Being able to control what information is required can make the customer’s journey much more efficient, removing a lot of back and forth and frustration. As long as it isn’t excessive information that you’re asking for, you’ll get a full picture of the customer’s query without having to pester them with follow up questions.

So you’ve set up your awesome Facebook page – your cover photo looks great, all your contact information is up to date, your logo is in place and fans are growing. But then you see it – your business or brand has another page! Maybe it was a colleague who set it up before you decided to take it seriously. Maybe it was a page for an old location. Or maybe you just totally forgot about the page you set up when you were running as a home business.

Your first instinct might be just to delete these pages. But what about the fans you have on there already, waiting eagerly for you to post an update? There is a way to request that these pages be merged. Facebook staff will administer this themselves, it isn’t automatic – expect to wait a couple of days for a response. But what should you know before you request a merge of pages?

• The pages you want to merge must represent the same thing
• The page with fewer likes will be merged into the page with more likes
• The pages being merged must have the same location info (if they have any)
• Likes and check ins will be combined
• The page or pages with fewer likes will have all of the content posted to it permanently deleted
• You can’t “de-merge” the page or pages you’ve merged. They will disappear from Facebook – forever…
• Finally, you need to be a manager of the pages you want to merge – obviously. But it would be funny to see Coca-Cola’s page try to merge Pepsi’s.

A note on that last point – if you can’t remember logins or a former colleague set the page up, you can claim the page – again this is a job for Facebook and so it can take a day or two.

Click for full size

Now all you have to do is go to the admin area of the page with the most likes, which is hopefully the one you have been putting all your hard work into! Click “Edit page” at the top of the Admin Panel, then select “Update info” from the drop down menu.

Then, select “Resources” from the list on the left and click on “Request to merge duplicate Pages”. From there, you’ll be presented with the options of which main page you wish to keep and up to 5 Pages to merge into it.

If everything’s legit and no problems are flagged, Facebook will send you a confirmation email to let you know that the pages have been merged, usually after a couple of days.

And that’s that! Now all of your rogue Facebook pages can be merged into one easy to manage hub of socialness!

And now there’s even more to play with. Last year, Twitter made some exciting changes to profile pages that meant a header could be added. Similar to Facebook’s cover photo option, it allows users to add extra colour and imagination to their Twitter profile. There have been some really creative and fun examples added to profiles since then, but you don’t have to go nuts to get noticed (although it helps!).

In this post, we’ll look at the best practices for personalising your Twitter profile and the optimal dimensions for images.

Background

This seems a logical place to start, as it will transform the feel of your profile page instantly. There are a few rules here, but once you know how it works and start experimenting, you can turn a once barren landscape into your own realm.

The image you use as your background will need to have some thought put into it if you want to include additional information in the image, like phone numbers, email and creative elements. Not all screens are the same and so not every user will see the spacing of your profile in the same way.

It’s best to optimise the background image for a 1024×768 resolution. That way, it will look good on all screen sizes and dimensions. Most screens will fit this criteria anyway, but you won’t want to exclude those using other screen sizes. With the proper use of fades and solid background colours, you can create a ‘one size fits all’ background image that caters to everybody.

The diagram below roughly maps out a profile page at 1024×768:

Keep the top banner in mind and space your image accordingly. You’ll have around 120px space to the left, which you can brand with a logo and add text to the background. Don’t go over the top here, you wouldn’t want to distract from your tweets!

Match the solid background colour in Twitter to your background picture. That way, if a user scrolls out, zooms out or has a larger than average screen, they won’t see a solid edge when they get there. Fading your image into the background colour is great for a seamless effect.

The maximum size anybody is likely to view your profile on is 1920×1080 – so go this high if needs be. Using a .png file will keep text looking crisp – jpeg images are just too lossy for hard edges and text, but work great for photographs.

Be as creative as you like but remember that your tweets are really what you want everyone looking at. Try to keep text to a minimum and use logos, colours and imagery to convey your message.

Profile Picture

Arguably the most important picture you’ll ever upload to Twitter is your profile picture. Don’t leave the generic ‘egg’ as your profile picture, unless you want to be ignored. If the profile page you’re updating is for your business, use your company logo – if it’s personal, use a picture of yourself that you like. It’s much easier to get to know someone if you know what they look like.

The dimensions for a profile picture? 81×81 pixels – that’s not a lot of room, so make it count. In the news feed, your profile image will be even smaller, at 48×48.

Shared Images and Videos

When viewing media in the news feed, images will display within a 375×375 frame when expanded. Orientation and aspect ratio will be preserved, but a square picture will fill the space. A shared video will expand to 435×244, with the first 160 characters of the video’s description displayed here too.

Header

Just as Facebook gives you a cover photo, Twitter gives you a header. This image can be anything you like, any colour or pattern you can think of. It will be displayed at 520×260 pixels, but you don’t have to optimise it for that resolution – a larger image will automatically be scaled. A dark fade will be applied over it, making the text in your bio clear to read, so bear that in mind.

Stuck for ideas? Have a look at the amazing ideas below – let your imagination run wild!

Finally

Match up your colour scheme. You can pick the colour of links in your tweets to fit your brand or the rest of your profile. It’s a little finishing touch that brings it all together and shows that you’ve put time and thought into your online image. You can match up web colours with an eyedropper tool like Instant Eyedropper.

If things don’t look quite right at first, try again. A little tweak here and there and before long your profile will be looking just the way you want it. If you’re stuck for ideas or don’t think that you can pull off your amazing ideas without a pro designer, contact us – our talented design team can make the craziest of ideas a reality.