Ever since Google+ released in late June, the amount of new users has been on an exponential uphill rise. With that kind of competition now in place, it’s no wonder Facebook had to do something to maintain their ‘top dog’ spot in the social media world.

One clear distinction between the two networking sites was how each managed to segment ones friends. Google+ allows the user to segment people into what they named, “Circles.” The user can create circles of relationships ranging from friends, family, or acquaintances. It was finally possible to share those “girls’ night out” pictures selectively, with whom you wanted to share them with, rather than your 500+ network of friends.  This new segmentation option posed as a definite pro to joining Google+, and therefore resulted in tens of millions of new users.

Facebook saw this as a clear advantage Google+ had on them, therefore they had to keep the ball rolling with its latest update, Smart Lists. Unlike Google+ Circles, Smart Lists will automatically segment your friends into three groups:

• Friends you attended school with
• Friends who live <50 miles from you
• Friends you work with

If these automated lists still aren’t privacy-effective enough, Facebook is promoting a feature that allows one to manually segment friends into the following three groups:

• Close Friends – People you want to hear from often
• Acquaintances – People you do not want featured prominently in your News Feed
• Restricted – People who you do not want to share information with

With these new Smart Lists in place, Facebook users can now easily share the content they want to share with a specified list of friends by using a filter on their news feed. So when comparing the new features of Smart Lists, Friends Lists, and updated privacy settings on Facebook versus Circles on Google+, who do you see as the social media networking leader?

The state of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany is banning Facebook’s “Like” button on German websites based in the region.
The controversial decision is lead by officials and Thilo Weichert, the head of the Independent Centre for Privacy Protection of the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, whom are giving website owners until the end of September to remove the “Like” button or face a 50,000 Euro fine.

Weichert has concerns about Facebook’s privacy settings and the company’s overwhelming control on people’s data. “Facebook can track every click on a site, how long I’m there, what I’m interested in,” told Weichert to German newspaper FAZ. He argues that the “Like” button on one’s website illegally sends the data to Facebook, which is then used to profile and understand web habits.

In its press release, the Independent Centre for Privacy Protection reveals its concern that Facebook uses the data to create “a broad individual and for members even a personalized profile. Such a profiling infringes German and European data protection law. There is no sufficient information of users and there is no choice; the wording in the conditions of use and privacy statements of Facebook does not nearly meet the legal requirements relevant for compliance of legal notice, privacy consent and general terms of use.”

This isn’t the first time Germany put its foot down to protect its citizen’s privacy. The street view of one’s home on Google map can be pixelated, if the homeowner chooses to. Also, Facebook’s facial recognition feature has been criticized.

Weichert and the Independent Centre for Privacy Protection are showing resistance to Facebook’s growing intrusion into user’s privacy but it’s a battle that everyone else chose to avoid. Yes, Facebook is intrusive, but only if you let it be.  Anyone who clicks a “Like” button is taking the responsibility to share that information. The feature shouldn’t be banned since it is only an option, if someone wishes to share information about his/her interests.

A lot of people are concerned about Facebook’s privacy settings but users need to remember that they are the ones with complete power in deciding which information to share or not.

As of August 11th, Google+ has introduced games to its social networking site in attempts to add another dynamic element to sharing with friends.  This announcement also comes as a first effort to battle one of the most popular features within Facebook that is set to generate around $1 billion in website advertising revenue for 2011.

The search engine company will begin by offering 16 games including the very popular Angry Birds, Zombie Lane and Zynga Poker with other titles like FarmVille coming soon.  Users of Google+ will now be able to share on another level with the ability to update with friends, join leaderboards, brag about high scores, invite others or just ignore social gaming all together and focusing on other Google+ applications.

The Google+ games page will be  for the user that wants to improve their scores or share with friends.  As with most Google projects, Google+ games will be constantly updated and improved using user feedback.  With more new game titles coming out soon, Google+ should be a viable alternative for social network gaming for years to come.

Facebook recently unleashed a powerful Facebook for business help guide. This allows business users to correctly set up a page to better market their business or organization. The how to guide explains how to create a page for a specific type of business, shows you how to publish ads or sponsored stories, and suggestsbuilt– in apps for mobile marketing. The page also provides links to help create pages, content, and apps. Now that is what we call a pretty summed up lesson of Facebook Marketing 101. In March, the social network site created a feature that converts personal profiles to business pages. Facebook has launched many features that attract the regular user, business owner and entrepreneur. It also benefits the not-so-internet savvy people to get a tutorial lesson on how to develop their business page.

Will this Facebook for business guide set back Google +?

Facebook’s next step of providing users guides to create business pages can maybe a sign of showing stronger competition to Google +. Recently released in June, Google + has only just focused on individual pages. Google is testing out ways for businesses to utilize it.

Bringing Facebook in on your online marketing strategy is a popular addition to your business’s marketing mix. Facebook’s for business guide should help you get started on a winning Facebook strategy. In this social media  generation, take advantage of building a business presence in the millions of users in the Facebook community. Do you think small businesses will benefit from creating a Facebook business page?

Facebook just launched its mobile instant messaging service in attempts to become a viable alternative to a number of similar products.  This launch has been subject to the United States with the outlook of expanding in the near future.  Its new service, Facebook Messenger provides its users with the ability to hold text conversations anywhere in addition to adding locations and multiple people to a group chat.  Other competition includes the BlackBerry Messenger, Google+’s mobile app and the pending Apple iOS 5 iMessage.

So how does Facebook’s messaging service compare?

Currently, the most notable competitor is the BlackBerry Messenger where users of BlackBerry devices can send free text messages, photos, status updates and availability posts to other BlackBerry users anywhere, including internationally.

Google+ allows messages that can begin on a users computer account and continue within the mobile app.  Like the Facebook messenger, Google+ “huddles” incorporate group chats and can be accessed anywhere.

Apple’s new iOS 5 could provide a formidable challenger to all these services once released.  It includes the likes of free texting, photo, video, location and contact sharing.  Users can even pick up conversations right where they left off with any of their personal iOS 5 devices.  It is limited, however, on the same level as BlackBerry’s – it can only be used with other iOS 5 devices.

Each system has its pro’s and con’s but the Facebook service has advantage in its versatility amongst several mobile devices.   The messaging service has already floated to the top of the “Top Free” apps in Apple’s app store and since the company has 750 million members people will undoubtedly try out the service.  Whether people continue to use it, however, may depend on its accessibility, potential upgrades and competitor’s response.

Mark Zuckerberg watch out- Google+ is not going anywhere. It has been open for a little over a month now and everyone’s been asking whether the new social networking site is here to stay, and YouGov took matters into their own hands to find the answer. They conducted a survey for 1,003 adults in the US regarding Google+ usage, future use, and usage of other social media websites (like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter). Their results bode well for Google, which they summarize here.

There are already 25 million Google+ accounts, which is 13% of the US population. While Facebook has penetration of 71%, Facebook has a considerable head start. YouGov predicts that over the next year, there will be an additional 9% of the population acquiring a Google+ account. According to their survey it looks like 30% of Facebook users, that also have Google accounts, are planning to cut down on time spent on Facebook.

When compared to the Facebook demographic, there are some stark differences that YouGov points out:

• 3 men on Google+ to 1 woman
• 59% of Google+ people have a college degree while Facebook has 37%
• 48% are single, while Facebookers are 33% single. In my own experience with Facebook though, many relationships are jokes between friends. In my opinion, the count on “real” relationships reported on Facebook cannot be determined by Facebook relationship status.

Google has a different target market than Facebook, which appeals mostly to college students while Google+ aims for college educated young men

In fact, Google+ is predicted to become the #2 site behind Facebook in the next year with 22% penetration while LinkedIn, Twitter, and Myspace all have under 20%. With the next push for Google+ accounts over the next 12 months, the social media industry is going to have a run for its money… well, whatever part of it isn’t owned by Google already.

More and more Facebook users have found a new home in Google+, but have been stumped by a single problem: where did all my pictures go? On Facebook, the amount of photos that people have been tagged in usually outweighs the amount of photos that someone has uploaded himself or herself. For the person that relies on getting most of their pictures from other friend’s albums, this poses a problem.

Recently there have been multiple methods on how to transport your Facebook pictures to Google+ that have proved to make this moving processed a little bit easier. Out of all of the methods that I tested, the easiest and most efficient one I discovered was posted on moveyourphotos.com. For this process all you have to do is download either the Google Chrome or Firefox add-ons that I have placed below and follow the guided instructions on how to transfer you Facebook pictures.

Download Photo Importer for Google+ (Firefox)

- Download Photo Importer for Google+ (Chrome)

Instructions:

1. Download and install the add-on from the link above (simply drag the file onto the Firefox window to install)
2. Navigate to within a Facebook photo album which you would like to transfer to your Google+ account
3. Enter a name for the album in the text box on your brand spanking new photo-importer toolbar.

   

4. Click ‘make album’
5. At this point, you may repeat the last 3 steps with as many different Facebook albums as you want
6. When you have recorded the information of all the albums you wish to import to Google+, click ‘submit all albums’
7. You will be brought back to moveyouralbums.com and given a link to login to your Google account
8. Once you have logged in to Google we will begin processing your photos, upon completion we will give you a link to your new albums on Google
9. AND YOU’RE DONE!!! Don’t you just feel all warm inside now?

Things never seem to stay the same in the world of Facebook.  Since December when the social network changed its default settings to share users’ profile information with anyone, unless a specific user opted out, Facebook has received a healthy amount of flak from privacy advocates and regular members eager to keep their profile info to themselves.  Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, then defiantly declared we were headed to “a web where the default is social” last month when he expanded his definition of “anyone” – now the network was not only opening up profiles to other users, they were beginning to open up profiles to third-party websites.

Quitters Far From Winning

Facebook’s privacy battle has only escalated.  The recent changes prompted a small but fierce group of insurgents to mobilize behind “Quit Facebook Day,” adopting the final day of the month of May as their D-Day, publishing on their site: “If you agree that Facebook doesn’t respect you, your personal data, or the future of the web, you may want to join us.”  As of this blog post, the QuitFacebookDay.com movement is just shy of 12,500 pledges to quit on the 31^st.

Facebook, which was probably hoping to lay low for a little while, also grabbed the cover of Time Magazine, due to hit newsstands (coincidentally) on May 31 with an article on the privacy concerns of the social network, called it the “the Web’s sketchy Big Brother, sucking up our identities into a massive Borg brain to slice, dice and categorize for advertisers.”  For all the doomsday rhetoric, worries over the site have yet to materialize into any concern regarding the overall stability of the network; the Quit movement would need to increase its members by 400 times to equal 1% of the total Facebook userverse.

Shift in Privacy Policy on the Horizon

Naturally looking to avoid Time Magazine’s characterization, Facebook has signaled today that they are reconsidering their privacy settings.  From a series of crisis management meetings of senior staff for the social network, all agreed that the privacy settings were at best confusing and at worst exploitative.  It is unclear at this point whether these changes would include an unlikely abandonment of Zuckerberg’s “open graph” proposal he unveiled last month or will satisfy privacy advocates.  Facebook, nonetheless, stresses its desire to remain “user-friendly,” thus fueling speculation that the default setting may be switched back, meaning only those users who opt-in will be sharing their public information with the vast public of third-party websites.  This would likely satisfy their near 500 million person network, as we only want to have a choice in the matter.  All in all, the flak Facebook faces nor the U-turn Facebook management is about to pull will likely hurt the stability of the massive network.  Sometimes things change while remaining the same.

Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerburg, surprised his almost 500 million man strong user-verse this week by unveiling new features for the social network at the F8 Developer Conference in San Francisco.  Some initial response has been hyperbolic, claiming an end to the Internet as we know it; however, conventional wisdom indicates that major changes to one of the Internet’s most popular Websites will doubtlessly impact our online experience in a dramatic way.  Zuckerburg’s vision is extraordinary and revolutionary; in his keynote, Zuckerburg proposed the Web as a social being, where you, your friends, your brands , and your favorite bands (among other things) are all a part of the experience.  Ultimately, Facebook is attempting to socialize the Web in a much deeper way than any previous vision.

Open Graph to Blur Existing Distinctions between Websites

The main feature of Zuckerburg’s vision includes the “Open Graph.”  The CEO highlighted current issues in connecting Facebook friends to one another through their Yelp or Pandora accounts, leaving many people unconnected precisely when they are sharing informed personal insight.  As a result, Zuckerburg has proposed the Open Graph, blurring the lines of current distinct Websites.

The Open Graph is essentially Facebook’s method for reading tags from other Websites to decipher what information their users are “liking.”  For example, IMDb starting immediately will include “Like” buttons for films, and Facebook will publish your recent favorite film. Likewise, favorite plays on Pandora will be published on your profile. Furthermore, this process will be fluid, allowing for information from a CNN article –  liked on CNN.com and published on Facebook –  to appear when you hover over the News Feed story.  Facebook has paired with major partners – including Microsoft, CNN, and ESPN – ensuring that there will be enough Websites from which users can begin to test these features.

A lot to “Like” about the Changes to Fan Pages

For brands and businesses, it just got a lot easier to gain fans.  Zuckerburg announced that a single line of code will integrate a “Like” option onto Websites, so that one click can ensure an interested customer has connected to the brand via Facebook. Just like the major partners, brands that include this code will make their website, a fan’s News Feed, and their fan page separated by less than three clicks.

There are skeptics who question whether the public desires to be so steeply invested in Facebook, or social networking for that matter, that are unsure of whether these changes to Facebook will indeed succeed.  It is important to keep in mind that Facebook’s 500 million person strong network can certainly find a sizeable group of test subjects.  The future of social networking and the Internet is uncertain; however, it seems there’s consensus to the claim that major changes are in the pipeline.

As of April 19th, 2010, Facebook no longer offers users the ability to “Become a Fan” of a page.  Instead, the option to “Like” a page will be the new way to connect with a company’s fan page.  This is not to be confused with the option to “Like” a status, comment, photo, etc. however, which will still simply mean showing one’s approval for another’s action.

Instead, this new form of liking will carry all the same connotation as becoming a fan used to, meaning stories from a page one likes will still show up in their newsfeed and a list of pages one likes will still be displayed in their info section. This change may seem arbitrary and unnecessary on Facebook’s behalf—considering the web has seen a flurry of articles about the existence and effect of this change on Facebook and SEM.

Why Change One Word?

So, many people are wondering why Facebook would go through all this trouble to change one word on their website.  Facebook has stated that they made this change to promote consistency throughout the site.  Basically, instead of having different terms for different actions, Facebook wants to group as many actions together as possible.

Moreover, a recent study revealed that Facebook users click the “Like” button much more frequently than they click the “Become a Fan” button. Therefore, there may be some grounds to support changing the button based upon this study; however, it would seem to us, as Internet marketers, like comparing apples and oranges.

Future of the Changes

In general, this change reflects Facebook’s attempt to make connecting with a fan page less committal, in an effort to promote user fan page interaction, as this is their main source of revenue. They are considering “liking” something to be less serious than “becoming a fan.” Facebook expects that this change will positively affect users’ probabilities of connecting with a page.

The question then becomes, once users realize the change and comprehend that “liking” a page is equivalent to previously “becoming a fan,” will their behavior still confirm to Facebook’s predictions?  We aren’t sold but regardless, Facebook contends it will stimulate a permanent shift in user perception of connecting to fan pages.

Only time will tell whether this change will have a significant effect on Facebook users’ behavior, but in the meantime, Facebook page owners should ensure their followers understand that nothing has changed about their relationship with the fan page, other than the name of the most important action.