What you need to know about recent changes to two key social networks

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, businesses, brands, Web publishers, bloggers, educators, social media managers, individuals.

The social media landscape continually evolves, and it’s hard to keep up with all the changes. Platforms and apps I know and love suddenly have new capabilities, add-ons and new wrinkles. In this new feature, “New and Improved on the Social Web,” I’ll be highlighting some of the latest changes to social media platforms, apps and tools, and commenting on their implications. Let’s start by tackling the recent changes to Delicious (social bookmarking) and Facebook.

Delicious stacks

Delicious, the social bookmarking site — acquired not long ago by the founders of YouTube — just rolled out a completely new Web interface as well as a new product, Delicious stacks. The new interface is fun and updated and brings the brand experience in line with today’s Web experience and expectations. While Delicious has always enabled users to bookmark, tag and publicly share bookmarked URLs and tags, users were not able to compile sharable topic areas. The new feature, Stacks, is Delicious’ version of publicly curated content streams. Any Delicious user may create a topic (called a stack) and add links from around the web to create a stack of the topic. Delicious users can follow stacks, share stacks with others and save individual links within others’ stacks.

With the stacks rollout, Delicious is clearly trying to be a player in the content curation trend. If this succeeds, stacks could easily compete with other curation tools such as Google Reader, scoop.it and Pearltrees.

Open commenting allowed on Facebook pages

Facebook announced a lot of upcoming changes at their F8 developer conference in September. Some of those changes are rolling out now, with implications for your organization’s page.

One of the more significant changes to your page is that any Facebook user can comment on your posts and on your wall, without Liking the page first. Just as you had previously managed your settings to allow fans to write or post content to your Facebook wall, the new permission allows “users” to do so. One note: this is a change that you can opt out of – if you allowed fans to post, the new settings automatically allow any Facebook user to post.

Potentially more people will post to your page and Like (or Subscribe to) its content because they can interact with it more easily. Ideally, more Facebook users will see your content because the increased commenting will appear in users’ newsfeeds (now called “tickers”). A user still has to Like a page for that specific page’s updates to show up in his/her ticker. On the other hand, there is less incentive to Like a page if a user just wants to post or comment. The largest implication I see is that page admins now have an even better incentive to create engaging and sharable content.

New Facebook Insights & the ‘People are Talking About’ metric

The new “People are Talking About” metric appears below your page’s Likes, on the left-hand side of the wall. It is Facebook’s attempt to benchmark and reveal how engaging your page’s content is. The PATA metric includes people who:

• like, share, or comment on a post or on the wall
• answer a question on your page
• mention your page by tagging it, or tag a photo of yours
• like or share a check-in deal, or check-in at your Facebook place

The new Facebook Insights offers a more subtle breakdown of engagement by individual post than the old Insights did. The previous individual Post Impressions metric has been replaced with multiple engagement metrics: Reach, Engaged Users, Talking About This, and Virality.

According to Search Engine Land’s comprehensive summary of the new Insights:

“The goal of Pages Insights for Page admins is to understand what drives that number and how they can best engage their advocates, so that they can get a sense of how to optimize their Page content to increase the people they’re reaching with their messages. Which means that no matter the size of your Page’s audience, you can really get a good sense for which posts spread and get shared with others.”

I believe the new Insights will offer admins a more accurate sense of how engaging their pages’ content is with fans. If nonprofits are using social media to move online fans to take action, and to help the organization further its mission of changing the world, then creating more online engagement is a critical step in that path.

Related resources on Socialbrite

• Video tutorial: How to use the new Facebook Insights
• Facebook nuked the Like button, now what?
• 7 ways Facebook’s subscribe button could be a nonprofit game-changer

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