New Facebook Changes

(1) Newsfeed Changes

Gone are two different feeds (Most Recent / Most Popular)

Replacing it is a single News Feed which shows you both with Top News shown at the top, and Most Recent underneath. If you haven’t visited Facebook for a while, the first things you’ll see are top photos and statuses posted while you’ve been away. They’re marked with an easy-to-spot blue corner.

If you check Facebook more frequently, you’ll see the most recent stories first. Photos will also be bigger and easier to enjoy while you’re scrolling through.

Ken Tip: The use of photos in your posts has now become even more important to drawing exposure to your posts!

(2) Profile Button Removed!

The old right-hand corner trifecta “Home,” “Profile” and “Account” have parted ways. Instead of Profile, you now have a small thumbnail and name of the user you’re logged in as – that should make things clearer when you are using Facebook as a Page. Also, the “Account” has been replaced by a simple down arrow so you can access all your account, privacy and logout settings.

(3) News Ticker Added in Upper Right Corner

The ticker is a live-feed area that sticks to the upper right corner of the screen and gives you a running play-by-play of what is happening literally right now. Facebook has been playing around with the Ticker in various forms for a while now on a small scale, but now it is rolling out to everyone. Click on anything in ticker to see the full story and chime in – without losing your place.

(4) The Subscribe Button

The Subscribe button allows you to set just how much you want to hear from a person. In fact Facebook will now allow you to subscribe to someone even if you’re not friends (or let others subscribe to you). The latter only works with posts set to public. You’re already getting your friends’ posts in News Feed. With the Subscribed button, you can choose how much you see from them:

Ken Tip: This feature can be great for consultants, but for companies and brands you want to keep using the business fanpage as it can be customized!

(5) Minor Changes

You no longer need 25 likes on a business page in order to grab a custom URL

Facebook will try to not choke your inbox by emailing you a daily summary of the “less important” notifications instead of individual ones. If it makes you feel more alive to have a full inbox, you can change it back to individual emails on the notifications page.

Posts or comments in another language prompt the appearance of a “translate” button.

Posts that have been shared will now include a link you can follow to see who has shared them

LinkedIn For Insurance Agents - What To Do

Over the last few years I have found many insurance agents being attracted to using LinkedIn. Reason being they liked the idea of LinkedIn being the “professional” social network. Where many felt facebook was not as business oriented. So they went to LinkedIn and created a free profile, connecting with whomever they could find.


For most agents that’s where it stops, creating a profile and accepting a few connection requests. When talking about LinkedIn with them I always hear the battle cry of “What am I supposed to do now?, nothing is happening!”

The true power of tools like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter is one very simple concept. It’s that people are very focused on them and likely to pay attention to communications occurring through them. So with LinkedIn, if you want to take it to the next level then you have to utilize their communication tools. For most of you, you probably didn’t even know they existed.

What Does Ken Do
I go into LinkedIn, and upload in my entire “potential client email list”. Then LinkedIn manually allows you to choose to connect with whomever you feel has potential from your list. Once you send the connection requests out, over the next few days you will see a steady stream of people accepting them. Now these aren’t people I know, but that’s ok because my goal is to connect with potential clients, add them to my distribution list and then target them with targeted LinkedIn messages. You have to realize that 80% of people using social media have no idea how it works or what they are doing. So they are very likely to accept your connection requests. Advanced users realize this and use it to their advantage.

Once your connections start to grow, the next step is to organize them into “sub folders” it’s called “tagging”. When you connect with someone they go into the “Untagged” folder. First you need to create a few sub folders by clicking on “manage tags” in the Connection area. Then you need to go in and move that connection into a folder that describes them. Let’s say you connect with Bob and he is a business owner that you could target for Employee Benefits. Well then you should create a sub folder for Business Owners. When you come up with a targeted message that business owners would be interested in you can go into that folder, select it and send all the business owners that message. Now I know that may sound a lot like email, and a lot more work to send. However you have to realize when you send a LinkedIn message that it goes to the users LinkedIn inbox and it goes to their traditional email. However in their traditional email it will say they have received a message from their LinkedIn connection. This will look much different then the 100 other emails they may get that day, giving it a high probability of being opened and read!

Make sure that when you create a folder that you don’t put more then fifty connections in that folder. The reason is, LinkedIn only allows you to send a message to fifty people at once. So if you have over fifty connections of the same category you should create a second folder for that category.

This may seem like a lot of work initially, reason being you never actually put any work into LinkedIn. However once you have a very organized connection list you shouldn’t be wasting more then a few minutes a day with LinkedIn.

Once everything is organized you should get into a system of sending every new connection a LinkedIn message about your Facebook Business page and your Twitter account. Attempting to get them to become part of those distributions. Then “tagging” that connection into an organized folder.

Again, the power of LinkedIn is its new and people pay attention to it. Marketing 101 always tell us that you want to use communication tools that your potential clients are likely to pay attention to. The key with LinkedIn is to not be scared to connect with potential clients, and then put in the time to organize your distribution so you can take advantage of it.