Rob Sears, an award-winning professional, provides InView’s social media expertise. He specializes in developing and monitoring successful social, public relations and high-tech communications programs. An early adopter of social media, Sears is an expert in influencer analyst and engagement, topic/issue research, internal and external social media campaigns, audits, comprehensive measurement and dashboards. He has developed and implemented social media campaigns for clients in numerous industries including banking, finance, education, entertainment, consumer products.
In December Facebook rolled out its new profile, which marks its second major change to how users' information is displayed. In the new version personal information, friends, photos, activities, etc, are meshed together to convey a sense of a user's entire social life at a glance.
The change has met with surprisingly little criticism from users; usually when Facebook updates anything major like this, there is a sizable movement of people who threaten to leave the network in protest. Granted, there are issues with the new profile, but they are relatively minor and easy to fix. For example, one of my biggest concerns was how Facebook compiled bits of information I'd entered at some point and displayed it at the top of my profile. It read like a CIA dossier on myself, which made me really uncomfortable. Fortunately, it was easy to remove.
Switching over to the new profile is fairly easy. The developers at Facebook have set up a page explaining how the new profile works, which includes a button that will convert you over to the new format. Once you change, you can't revert back to the old version (all profiles will be migrated to the new format eventually, so there's really no reason to avoid making the switch). The entire process is fast and easy to follow.
After changing to the new look, Facebook takes you through a guided tour of your profile and illustrates what is different and why it's better than the old look. I took some screenshots during my migration, which can be seen in the gallery below.
Aside from the "dossier" at the top of the page (which I eventually removed), I really like how the new profile looks. It has a much friendlier and more colorful look to it than the previous two iterations. Most of the other features like videos and photo albums remain unchanged. The developers also did a bit of work on the content-sharing toolbar by hiding the textbox. Now to share links, status updates, photos, etc, one has to actually select what they want to share and then the toolbar will present the appropriate interface.
Finally, I'll share a fun little hack that some users with a lot of free time have figured out. This template will let you break up a large photo into several smaller ones, which can be uploaded to your Facebook profile. It takes advantage of the top row of photos and lets you personalize your page a bit more. Here are a TON of cool examples. See my version in the gallery:
