I’m pretty excited about the new look to the Facebook News Feed!
Let’s face it, a big business like Facebook doesn’t make these decisions lightly; without a lot of thought, research, testing and such. Yes, they’ll likely get some flack from this change. Some of us like change more than others. And, hey, that’s what makes the world interesting.
But I happen to like what I’ve seen of the change so far. I’m thinking that the change may be a big improvement for business Pages, most of whom struggle to find interesting content to share that also, at least occasionally, promotes their business and makes it into the Facebook news feed.
Yes, Facebook is a social platform and fans do not want to be barraged non-stop with advertising messages. That said, brands – small and large – use social media to build name recognition, relationships with potential clients and to improve their bottom line. As much as we might like to do it just for fun, few of us can afford to do so.
So how will this change be an improvement for business?
The layout of the news feed provides a variety of options for people to choose to view what they would like to see, one of which is ‘Following’, in other words ‘Pages’.
Why is that good? Here’s why: the ‘Following’ tab will be listed, along with all the other options, in the drop down menu at the top of the page for fans to choose.
The menu (listed below) is one that regular Facebook users are likely to use when signed in, if they want to choose anything other than the default (Facebook ‘Top Stories’ sorted) News Feed:
- News Feed (the default)
- Most Recent
- All Friends
- Photos
- Music
- Following
- Games
- Groups
- See All
When one of the menu items, other than default is chosen, it looks like Facebook will include all posts in that grouping in the order they were posted. In other words, they won’t be screened by Facebook (at least yet) to determine whether they should or shouldn’t show in a fans’ news feeds. This will continue to happen in the main news feed but not in these others, from what I’ve seen so far.
Assuming this is the case, brand Pages are more likely to be seen by those who have ‘liked’ their Pages. They now have two shots at appearing in the news feed:
- Chosen as a ‘Top Story’ by Facebook based on their criteria
- In with the crowd, unsorted, on the ‘Following’ Page
Of course, none of this guarantees brands will be more successful with Facebook but it will remove the ability to blame Facebook for not giving us enough exposure in the news feed. We’ll now have two opportunities to get in front of our audience and it’s up to each brand to do their homework and deliver to their fans what they’re looking for in order to gain a following.
Facebook is touting this new look as:
- Goodbye Clutter | Hello bright, beautiful stories
- Bursting With Color | Vibrant new visuals bring your News Feed to life.
- Fresh Feeds | Get Facebook just how you want it with your choice of feeds.
- Everywhere You Go | See the same clean look wherever you use Facebook – on mobile, tablet, or web.
From first glance, I think it may be a winner!