Facebook: What I’d Do If I Ran Your Blog

One of the benefits of running a successful blog can be reputation management, and our friends at Facebook have had a little trouble in that department lately. No matter what your opinion on the company’s various public relations problems, you may well have noticed the violent backlash they suffered after launching the News Feed, opening their doors to the public, and after they deployed their most recent advertising platform. They did quite well during the uproar over their News Feed, which publishes a user’s actions to his or her friends. Posting an apology at the top of the offending News Feed and scrambling to implement security features, Feedgate was quickly forgotten. Facebook treated similar public announcements, apologies, and explanations in a similar way: a “one box” entry at the top of the homepage.

However, step away from Facebook for a second (it’s hard for me; is it tough for you, too?) and think about how websites and companies in our industry deal with reputation management crises. Most of us don’t have to post apologies on our homepages because we have blogs that people actually read. Good and bad news usually finds its way into our blog’s posts. Our readers comment on the posts; we reply.

Have a look at that last sentence again: readers comment on the posts. One of the most astounding things about Facebook’s blog is that there are absolutely no comments. Facebook users are usually prolific commenters! We can’t click past a photograph without adding something. Given the chance to interact with the people who create and maintain the very service we’re using, we just stand there like shy five-year-olds?

The first reason why Facebook’s blog gets no attention is blatantly obvious: It’s completely invisible. There was once a link to the blog in the site’s footer, but it is now gone. The About Facebook link has a “Latest from the Facebook Blog” section which, on most monitors, is well below the fold. The link to the blog’s main page is grey and doesn’t look live.

In fact, the blog is so buried that it’s like they’re actually trying to hide it. While nobody arrives at Facebook specifically to read its blog, I’d make it a little more visible. Some of Facebook’s more controversial actions took place after staff had blogged about their imminent implementation; the company could have benefited from hearing users’ feedback before, as opposed to after, the changes were live.

Another reason for the blog’s lack of appeal is its authorship. Since its inception, forty-one Facebook employees have contributed content. I’m sure if you sat down and listed every writer you knew of who’d ever published online, you could come up with more than forty-one people. However, for a single company, forty-one writers is way too many. Readers just can’t connect with that many people, and most successful blogs rely on readers establishing a relationship with writers.

At SEOmoz, our core group of writers includes only four or five people, which is a small enough number for regular readers to remember who we are and what we’ve written in the past. You know a little bit about us and you’re familiar with our writing styles. If charged with remodeling Facebook’s blog, I would find five or six of the company’s best writers from a number of different departments. I’d look for a PR person, a developer, an executive, a product manager (or similar) from the advertising platform, a privacy specialist, and someone who works in TOS or quality control. Secondly, I’d make them blog regularly.I feel a bit of a fool chastising Facebook for not having people write regularly enough, since their most recent post is from yesterday, December 18. However, the most recent entry prior to this is from thirteen days earlier. I get the feeling that if SEOmoz didn’t post anything for two weeks, very few of you would be checking back daily to see if we’d written anything new. People who blog irregularly usually rely on feed readers to let people know when they’ve composed something new, but with that reliance comes the assumption that readers are web savvy enough to use feed readers. Do Facebook’s members all subscribe to blogs? I seriously doubt it; however, I do believe that they’d read Facebook’s blog if it were more visible.

I would include new blog posts as items in users’ News Feeds. Currently, News Feeds show people which groups their friends have joined, who’s written on whose profile, who’s been commenting on whose photographs, etc. It would be very easy to include brief but regular notifications about new blog posts. Also, I’d include a link to the blog in the site’s omnipresent navigation:

For maximum exposure with minimum interference, I’d include it at the top of the page, placed somewhere amongst the smaller links. This way, it’s not taking up too much valuable real estate, but it is more likely to be seen, especially by people who are going for the “home” link.

Going back to the subject of feeds for a moment, the blog does provide a subscription link. It’s well hidden at the bottom of the sidebar and there is no explanation of what it is. While the majority of you here at SEOmoz don’t need an explanation of RSS, there would be no harm in providing a little “What is this?” link for Facebook members who may be interested in learning more.

Next, I’d add categories. Blogs that belong to big, diverse companies often turn into scratch-pads for employees to record a manner of entries on many different subjects. However, what happens when I want to read solely about safety on Facebook, or about the changes they’ve made to their search features? Right now, I’d have to sort out which of the forty-one authors deals with my chosen subject and sort through their entries. With categorisation, I’m more likely to find what interests me.

Above the subscription link, there is a neat little section called “New on Facebook” that names some recent features the site has added. Did you know that if, like me, you were born with a different name than you have currently (I didn’t like it, so I changed it. True story.) you can tell Facebook what the name was and your current profile will show up when people search for your old name? And that the old name won’t appear anywhere on your profile? Isn’t that cloaking? Is it sad that I thought of that?

What about brand / fan pages at Facebook: how long did it take for you to notice them? How about the feature whereby you can make any one of your pictures your profile picture immediately? Yes, they stole that from Bebo, but it’s a great idea.

The area explaining these new features is only available on the blog (I’m not counting an even better-hidden link on the About Facebook page), and the newly released features don’t link to anything.

The “See More New Features” link just doesn’t cut it for me: I want each item to link to detailed explanation of the feature. Perhaps this is just the SEO in me coming out, because I find the idea of not linking to helpful things kind of abhorrent.

As far as participation goes, I would encourage Facebook staff members to begin commenting on others’ posts to get the comments started. I’d also encourage them not to have Facebook listed as their primary network, so that their comments look as though they’re coming from regular members of the site and not from employees. People are notoriously shy when it comes to “serious” comments (as opposed to celebrity gossip blog comments): couple this with the fact that you’re forced to use your real name when commenting at Facebook, and it’s obvious that people will have to be baited into participating.

Then there is the constant debate regarding how much text to display on a blog’s homepage. You’ll notice that at SEOmoz, we display partial posts if you are not signed in and full posts if you are. Facebook is currently showing entire posts on their blog’s homepage. Upon arriving at the blog, there is a good chance that any given Facebook user won’t be completely enthralled by the current post. I’d show partial posts in the hope of presenting a range of content and retaining more readers.

Back to the sidebar. The New on Facebook page’s sidebar includes recent mainstream news stories about Facebook and a link to the company’s job openings. I see no good reason not to include this on the blog as well: the news headlines are especially relevant. Facebook can also carefully select these mainstream news stories for reputation mangement’s sake, linking only to those which paint it in the best possible light. The company’s blog is indexed, and those links it adds to external sites receive some very yummy link juice. The only thing I don’t like about this idea is that it may clutter the sidebar.

I also realise that this is nothing but cute talk without some actual implementation on my part, so I rearranged the blog to fit my recommendations. Please note that I’m no designer and all I did was copy, paste and re-word what is already on the page. However, I really do think that Facebook could use their blog far better than they are already… they could optimise it, so to speak! The horrible little image below links to a far larger version of the same thing which, of course, your browser will also attempt to shrink. On the left is the Facebook blog in its current form; the right-hand image is mine.

 

As I mentioned above, I think my sidebar is too cluttered, but the page is actually a bit longer than that which I’ve worked with here. Also, given more time and more blog posts to work with, I’d invent a far more comprehensive list of categories. At the very least, I believe the blog could be more interesting than it is currently.

As a second installment of “Wasabi Wednesday,” which is our very odd name for the day on which we write about Social Media, this has far more to do with blogging than it does SMM. We’ll be back to writing about the top nineteen ways to spam Digg next week, I promise.