It’s everywhere, inescapable. In every news outlet, in every country of the world (sometimes as a front page story), Facebook privacy settings are changing once again. That fact in itself is practically a landmark in the importance of social networking sites, but that’s a different blog post.

So you may be thinking, as I’m sure quite a lot of Facebook’s almost 500 million registered users are, what exactly is going on?

Not so long ago Facebook changed their privacy settings to allow users granular access to their privacy settings, to control exactly who can see what, when, where and in what context. Personally I thought this was a marvelous idea, and the first thing I did was set everything to private. Job done, straightforward and spelled out for you there in black and white.

Unfortunately this spelled trouble for people who found the level of control to be overwhelming and confusing, and after a few privacy gaffes (including a few choice comments from Mark Zuckerberg himself) and millions of users threatening to delete or abandon their accounts, Facebook have caved to the pressure and are rolling out a simpler, one click approach to privacy controls. But what exactly does this mean?

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Imagine your new website goes live. You’re ecstatic about the feel, the look, new functionalities and – even better – the increase in visits which might (and should!)  ultimately lead to more business. And then, one year on – what do you do? Do you look at your stats? Do you know what’s going on on your website?  How many people have visited, where they came from, how many referrers you have? How long they stayed and what pages they looked at?

Or you’re engaging in email marketing. How many split tests have you done recently? Do you know what your database likes? Does one part of your recipients always receive a different version of your emails or does everybody always get the same design, same message, same “from”,  same everything? And how many times do you change your Google AdWords to see if you can get in those extra % clicks…

Do you know which digital mix gives you the best conversions…?

Do you constantly test and improve…?

If the answer is yes – great! You’re doing the right thing to monitor and (potentially) improve your communication with the customer then this is what marketing is all about. If not, it might be worth considering – simply because in the fast changing digital world something that worked a year ago can be the spanner in the works 12 months down the line.

The magic formula is testing, testing and again testing. Everything that can be changed in your digital mix is worth testing to ensure that your marketing works. Test your website (layout, images, design, the options are endless), test your email marketing, try different ads in  your Pay-per-click, play around with your banners, test different approaches in Social Media and see what works and what doesn’t.And then go out and do something about it.