With sites like Twitter and Google Plus hot on its heels, Facebook is hustling to maintain its lead as a social network leader. Over the past few 
months, the site has been slowly rolling out changes big and small to keep things fresh. And it doesn’t look like its momentum will be slowing anytime soon. With so many new features and improvements, it’s only natural some of these developments would be overlooked. No worries! Here are 5 things you didn’t know Facebook could do for you:
- COLLABORATE ON A DOCUMENT Within a Group page, click on Docs at the top of the page and then the Create a Doc button on the right-hand side to create a text-only document that everyone in the group can edit. When you save the document, it will be posted to the group’s feed, just like a status update, with an Edit button in the upper-right corner. To see previous revisions, click Recent Changes.
- ADD A CALENDAR TO YOUR PAGE If you’re a business owner, a team coach or a performer who wants to keep everyone on Facebook apprised of your coming events, simply creating separate Facebook events for each one can be ineffective. These can get lost in the stream of events, making it hard for people to check for, say, your next game. As an alternative, use the Social Calendar app, which was not developed by Facebook. Go to facebook.com/SocialCalendar and click the Add to My Page link in the lower left corner. That will pop up a menu of pages you manage. Click Add to Page next to one or more pages, then click Close. Those pages will now include a Calendar link in their upper left corner, just below Wall, Info and Photos. Social Calendar is pretty smart — it will autocomplete the names of events you’ve already created, and if you type in an Address field, it will add a map link to the location on the calendar. But for maximum attendance, you should still post status updates announcing an event.
- TRACK YOUR PAGE’S SUCCESS On any page you own, whether it is for your business or your clog-dancing club, click View Insights in the upper right corner. Facebook will display charts of user information and page interactions. Beyond the number of Likes and comments, it will plot a graph of page views and user feedback, plus a breakdown of which Web domains are sending traffic to your page, and the demographics of your visitors. If you want to do your own number-crunching, you can export the data into an Excel-compatible file.
- CREATE A POLL Hiding in plain sight above the box to enter status updates is a Question button. Posting a question looks just like posting an update, except that it takes the first three answers from your friends and turns them into a poll to keep the discussion focused. You can also set up the poll with your own answers, or add more to those Facebook creates.
- EDIT LINK NAMES AND DESCRIPTIONS If you want to post a link to your Facebook page but don’t like the title or description that Facebook automatically pulls from the linked page, you can change it. Before you click the Share button, click on the title or description in your pending post. They will change into editing boxes, like those to rename a file on your computer desktop. When you’re done editing, press Enter to save your changes.
Looking for more tricks you didn’t know Facebook could do? Check out this article by Business Day Personal Tech.
