Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Bringing Facebook's structured status updates to the mobile experience


Image Source: digitaltrends.com




Updating a Facebook status used to be simple: One would just type something in the status update box—a myriad of stringed words ranging from “Today is a very nice day” to “I feel very cranky today, please don’t hang around me”—whatever reflects the user’s current emotions, activities, and whatnot. But with Facebook’s extremely dynamic nature, this simplicity was bound to change. True enough, by the start of 2013, the world’s largest social network introduced structured status updates, a more visual and organized way of letting other people know whatever users are up to.


Image Source: allfacebook.com


With structured status updates, users find a drop down menu that presents them several options such as “eating,” “feeling,” and “watching” which will then be appended to the status update. This new feature is considered to be a clever strategy which can be indexed in the graph search and later on leveraged to gather data for ad targeting. Unfortunately, this feature is exclusive to web and smartphone app users, thus leaving behind a sizeable number of mobile users which make up a great number of the Facebook user population.



Image Source: allfacebook.com


Facebook, greatly aware of the significance of the mobile demographic, tweaked its system to make sure mobile users don’t lag behind. Now everyone can get to enjoy the convenience of “structured updates” regardless of the device being used.

This move shows Facebook’s sensitivity to the growing mobile market, portending the social network’s future concentration with their constant system updates.

Social media marketers, such as John Bohan, keep abreast with whatever changes Facebook rolls out to ensure that they leverage these features toward greater customer satisfaction. More information about Mr. Bohan may be found at this Facebook page.

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