Your Year In Review, According To Facebook

At this time of year, there's no shortage of lists -- the 10 Best, the 5 Worst, the 100 Most Important…you get the idea. Now, thanks to Facebook, you can star in your very own list: the 2012 Year in Review, which shows the 20 most important moments of your year.

Of course, this is your year in review according to Facebook, so your 20 most important events are based not only on life events as recorded on the social network (changes in relationship, new jobs, and so on), but also on highlighted posts and your most popular content. So, my own top 20 most important events of the year include my family's summer vacation to Cape Cod and my older daughter's induction into her college honor society, but it also includes a well-"liked" picture I happened to post of that same daughter when she was less than a year old, screaming on Santa's lap. Important? Yes. Important in 2012? Not really.

Nonetheless, I love a good list, and it's kind of neat to see your year in review. That's actually one thing I really like about Facebook: I've never been good about keeping a journal, but Facebook has become the diary I never kept (at least, beyond the first day or two). It can be interesting, and even enlightening, to look back through your timeline. I've been using Facebook for more than four years at this point, so there's some decent history there. Indeed, there's enough to do some data analytics, like when my sister noted that, based on my Facebook updates, I have a demonstrated lack of willpower against candy corn that seems to begin around late-September.

[ Facebook introduces more granular control over privacy settings. Read more at Facebook's New Privacy Policies: The Good News. ]

Your 2012 Year in Review will also include the new Facebook friends you made this year, the pages you liked and the number of people who wished you well on your birthday.

You can try out the 2012 Year in Review here. It is not available for brands, but it might be a good way for individual brand ambassadors to promote their own achievements and by extension, their companies'. I also discovered, after unsuccessfully trying to access the 2012 Year in Review page on my iPad, that the feature requires Flash.

Will you give the 2012 Year in Review a try? Does it have any place in your marketing plan? Please let us know what you think in the comments section below.

Follow Deb Donston-Miller on Twitter at @debdonston.

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