What Facebook’s new News Feed tool means for you | Varn

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15 April 2019

What Facebook’s new tool on the News Feed means for your businesses

Facebook has always been dedicated to making sure that news feeds are personalised for each user, showing them posts and adverts that are relevant to them and that they are likely to engage with. After receiving feedback on the News Feed function, Facebook is making some improvements and offering more transparency to users.

The social media giant announced at the end of March that they are now going to become more open about why users are seeing certain posts, allowing them to better understand and control what they see from friends, Pages or Groups. To do this, they have introduced the “Why am I seeing this post?” tool and Facebook has said that this is the first time they have built information on how ranking works directly in to the Facebook app itself.

Facebook used feedback from users to help them determine what specific information would be most valuable and will continue to make improvements based on feedback that they receive going forward.

There are a few key things that the new feature will enable users to do, which will give them more control and further context:

  • Allow users to see why they’re seeing a certain post in News Feed — E.g. if the post is from a friendship, a Group that was joined, or a Page that was followed.
  • Provide users with information on what generally has the largest influence over the order of posts, including: (a) how often you interact with posts from people, Pages or Groups; (b) how often you interact with a specific type of post, for example, videos, photos or links; and (c) the popularity of the posts shared by the people, Pages and Groups you follow.
  • Shortcuts to controls that can assist with personalisation of a user’s News Feed, such as See First, Unfollow, News Feed Preferences, and Privacy Shortcuts.

They will also be making improvements to the “Why am I seeing this ad?” tool, which they launched in 2014, by adding additional details about the ads and their origin.

What does this mean for businesses?

Many businesses will have a Facebook page to help them connect with customers and potential customers. Whilst this new update from Facebook will not have a direct impact on business pages, it could change how users are interacting with pages.

With users being able to see exactly why they saw certain posts, and also change their newsfeed preferences in one easy motion, this could lead to a number of people unfollowing pages or being quicker to tell Facebook whether posts are relevant or interesting to them.

As a result, we could witness a decrease in the reach of our posts, due to many followers opting not to see posts from business pages.

There is a benefit from this though. That being that engagement may well improve thanks to Facebook becoming smarter about giving users what they want and what is most relevant to them.

If you are in need of help with your digital marketing, get in touch with the experts at Varn to discuss how we can assist you.

Article by: David, SEO Account Manager More articles by David

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