Christine Hsu

First of all, the short answer is no.

Facebook announced last week that their Gift Shop is officially closing on July 31. Currently, the Facebook Gift Shop lives as a gift icon under the Publisher Box within a your profile. If you click the icon, it expands to show all the available gifts that can be sent to your friend. In addition to closing the Gift Shop, Facebook will also be ending the Virtual Gift Homepage Engagement Ad offering to advertisers.

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Amidst heavy coverage of the effects of Facebook’s recent Open Graph and Social Plugin releases, one unforeseen side effect arose that no one predicted, not even Facebook. In order to link more users to Pages , Facebook connected fans’ Likes and Interests on their profiles with corresponding Facebook Pages. However, by doing so, Facebook inadvertently created thousands of unofficial community pages based on the way users entered their interests.

If you used to have Lady Gaga listed in your Favorite Music section of your Facebook profile, you would now become connected to the Lady Gaga Facebook page.

There were some upsides to Facebook’s changes – turning Likes and Interests into Page Connections. Specifically, if an Official Brand Page was aligned with a user’s likes or interests, Facebook automatically added those users into the Page. Some Official TV Show Pages saw as much as a two-fold increase in fans in the span of a week.

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Facebook is continually changing the way that users experience and interact with their platform – sometimes, to the detriment of brands, but more recently, to their benefit.  This week, a small change was made to Facebook’s notification system that could mean big things for companies who manage Fan Pages.

What has changed?

Brands now have the ability to appear in fans’ “Notifications” feeds on Facebook if the fan has engaged with Fan Page content. After a fan likes or comments on a Fan Page and the brand responds through a comment, the brand’s activity will pop up in the fan’s toolbar as a new notification, saying “Brand X has commented on their status” (or post, link, photo, etc.).

Above: Fan Page updates are now appearing in fans’ notifications.

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Nearly three years ago, Forrester Research released a study of Social Media where they grouped Internet users into six segments of social media usage, dubbed Social Technographic Profiles. These six profiles – Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, and Inactives, became widely used in the industry to describe the behaviors of consumers in social media, and to help inform corporate social media strategies.

This week, Forrester announced a new segment to be added to the Social Technographics Profiles – the Conversationalists. Conversationalists are social media users who update their status on Twitter or a social networking site (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) at least once a week. They are less involved than Creators, who write blogs, create content, or publish websites. But they are more expressive than Critics who simply post reviews, comment on others’ blogs, or contribute to forums.

The newly updated Forrester Social Technographics Ladder (Note: Segments are not mutually exclusive, therefore the percentages do not add up to 100%).

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