Friday Five: Newsfeed-pocalypse Edition

Five links that will make you smarter. Let's get right to it!

1. Facebook Tweaks Newsfeed... Again

Ah, those days of yore, when it was all about getting as many Facebook followers as you could because posting something on FB pretty much guaranteed that at least 50% of your followers would see what you posted. Oh, what sweet summer children we were. From an official Facebook statement released earlier this week:

Our top priority is keeping you connected to the people, places and things you want to be connected to — starting with the people you are friends with on Facebook. That’s why today, we’re announcing an upcoming change to News Feed ranking to help make sure you don’t miss stories from your friends... So we are updating News Feed over the coming weeks so that the things posted by the friends you care about are higher up in your News Feed... Overall, we anticipate that this update may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for some Pages.

Translation? More baby pics, less page posts. This is rough news for page managers - particularly publishers that rely so heavily on Facebook traffic - but in many ways its just more of the same game we have been playing for years now. Want organic reach? Regularly post stuff people actually care about and want to see in their feeds. There's really not a whole lot of other advice to give.

2. Facebook Fundraisers Coming

Speaking of Facebook... it will soon allow individual users to fundraise for registered non-profits. I'm not entirely sure if colleges and universities will be eligible to participate in this program (private colleges are 501c3 non-profits, but it's murkier for public schools... which is why many have separate foundations that handle fundraising) but it's definitely worth exploring - here's the link to get registered. This could turn into an incredible powerful way to do small-denomination, high-participation fundraising challenges - perfect for young alumni and "Act Now!" campaigns such as creating a scholarship in honor of a beloved professor who passes away, etc. Maybe this will help make up for no longer being able to reach anyone without boosting posts.  ;)

3. Twitter's New Dashboard

Twitter just announced a new dashboard, and... it's pretty darn great, shockingly. Imagine natively using Twitter to schedule post and manage mentions/key word/hashtag queues. Sure, they should have offered this, oh, five years ago, but hey - I guess better late than never, right? To get started with it, just click here and answer a few questions. So far for me, it offers a much more focused experience... not so great for goofing off and finding out about new things, but a real time saver for getting right down to business with the tweets that relate to my business.

4. Virtual Reality Storytelling

Virtual reality and 360 video are (according to the hype, anyway) the hot new things, but content creators are hitting some snags. Mainly, how to tell stories in this weird new field. How do you control someone experience in a medium that is inherently immersive and cries out for independent exploration rather than a guided tour. This Engadget Q&A with Robert Stromberg does a nice job laying out the challenges. Why include this on a #hesm blog? Sooner rather than later, some higher up somewhere is going to want to try out this VR/360 thing. And you should start thinking now about what might actually work for that medium and what will end up being a huge waste of time.

5. The Intersections of Social Media

I went to high school with a lot of smart people. Case in point, Jessica Columbo, who is both super rad and has lots of experience managing social media for OHSU, Oregon's medical school and the city of Portland's largest employer. She regularly posts really great stuff on LinkedIn, and her most recent article will really strike home for #hesm folks:

Social media will do very little for your organization, if it is only haphazardly “chunked on" to the end of a campaign or communication effort. Social communicators do their best work when they are included in the process from the start, and when their expertise can influence and add to work happening across team.

Word. To your mother.

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Music time. Fun, happy, bouncy, sunny Friday music!