As you’ve probably noticed, Facebook is looking a little different these days. Last week the social media giant made some major changes that has web users talking up a storm. So what are the changes that were made, and how will they affect you and your business? Let’s take a look.

The change that seems to have garnered the most attention after its launch is the news ticker. This ticker is designed to show you everything that is happening with your friends on Facebook in real-time. One positive behind this change is that it allows Facebook to get all of the game and application notifications, which most users don’t particularly care about, off of your news feed. It also allows you to see more of your friends’ activity as it’s happening which increases engagement on posts that you may have otherwise missed. And lastly, the ticker remains visible no matter where you go on Facebook, so you won’t miss anything that’s happening in your news feed while you’re visiting a Page that you’ve liked or clicking through your cousin’s latest photo album.

As with all of the changes that Facebook has made in the past, introducing ticker has brought up a number of privacy concerns.  It is important to note: YOUR PRIVACY SETTINGS HAVE NOT CHANGED! You may notice now that when a friend of yours comments on their friend’s status update, you have access to also comment on that update, whether you are a friend to their friend or not. Many people are upset to see people who are not their direct friends commenting on their activity but what they don’t realize is that these friends of friends have always had access to do this based on their privacy settings. If you are one of these people you can fix the problem by changing your privacy settings to “friends only.”

You may have also noticed that you can now subscribe to people’s updates rather than sending them a friend request. The subscribe button is great for those who want to connect with lots of people, but don’t necessarily want to let the whole world in at the “friend” level. Now you can choose to enable the subscribe button. Users who choose to subscribe to your profile will see all updates that you post at the public level. Updates that you’ve set to friends only or friends of friends will not be seen by your subscribers.

The subscribe button can also be used to limit what you are seeing from people who are already in your friends list. By clicking the subscribe button you can let Facebook know whether or not you would like to see updates from that person pertaining to life events, status updates, photos, games, comments and likes, music and videos, and other activity. You can select as many or as few as you want, which means you can still see your Aunt Martha’s status updates and photos, but you no longer have to be notified every time she plants a new vegetable in Farmville.

Another new feature we’re seeing are the smart lists that Facebook has created. If you look in the left column of your Facebook homepage you’ll see a listing of various groups of people arranged into the appropriately titled, “Lists.” These lists arrange your friends into groups based on various information that they’ve entered in their profiles. So if you went to Notre Dame and listed that in your profile, you will now see a smart list titled “Notre Dame” that will include anyone else who you’re connected to who also listed Notre Dame on their profile.

Lists that create themselves include school networks, businesses that you’ve worked at, and people who are in your same geographical location. Facebook has also set up lists for Close Friends and Acquaintances but unlike the smart lists, these will not automatically create themselves. You will have to manually add people to these lists because, as Facebook noted, you know better than they do who your closest friends are.

The final list that I want to mention is the Restricted list. This is another list that will need to be manually updated by you, but it will be well worth the effort! Adding people to this list will set them on the same level as your subscribers; they will only be able see updates that you’ve set to be visible to the public. This comes in handy when you receive a friend request from someone who you would rather not share all of your personal information, such as a new client who you don’t know particularly well. Ignoring the friend request could become uncomfortable since you see this person regularly through the course of doing business, but adding them as a friend could become equally uncomfortable. Now you can add them as a friend and then move them to your restricted list. They will not be able to tell that you’ve restricted their access to your profile and you won’t have to answer questions about why you wouldn’t approve their friend request. Win!

The biggest and most exciting of the changes is the one that has not actually rolled out yet. Timeline is the new way that Facebook will organize and display your historical data and is set to launch in beta later this week. With this change your profile will become a virtual scrapbook. Every thing you’ve done so far on Facebook will be sorted on a timeline by year and you can then add or delete entries to make things look the way you want them to.

Again, for those concerned with privacy, the information that is being presented in the Timeline view is nothing that is not already available on your profile. Facebook is simply making it easier for you to access this older data.

So how will all of these changes affect your business’s Facebook page? For the most part they won’t! While we will likely see the new Timeline look and feel applied to Pages in the near future, for now they will retain the same look and feel that they’ve had all along. Users will still go to and like your page the same way, and your updates will still show up in the news feeds of people who have liked you. The only real difference now is that there will be more competing data around your updates because of the larger number of things being shared through the ticker and through third party applications. It may be easier for your updates to become lost.

As always, the best way to keep your posts visible to fans is to optimize them for the news feed. Put simply, that means to be sure you are writing posts that are engaging, that your fans respond to, and that you are posting them on a regular basis. Pages that are only posting once a week are much more likely to get lost in the shuffle than those who post updates daily.

Please comment below if you have any questions on the new Facebook changes, or just to tell us what you think!