Facebook recently rolled out a new feature that lets users choose what content they want to “see first” in their News Feed. The “see first” option can be found in the settings section of the mobile app under “News Feed preferences.” Users are greeted with a friendly interface that looks like this:
Facebook will automatically suggest businesses and people it thinks you will favor. For my own profile, the algorithm displayed my employer, my sister, and a few of my closest friends – accounts I interact with regularly.
It’s no mystery why this feature was added. With the massive amount of content from friends, media outlets, and advertisers, News Feeds are overloaded, and Facebook is continually trying to find ways to reduce spam and increase relevancy.
Facebook’s recent press update states that despite their complex, filtering algorithm, “…ultimately you’re the only one who truly knows what is most meaningful to you and that is why we want to give you more ways to control what you see.”
Marketers are agonizing over what this means for their current marketing strategies on the social network. For instance, while Facebook pretty accurately predicted the people I wanted to follow, the algorithm left out a big category: my favorite businesses/brands. While users previously only had to “like” a company’s page to receive regular updates, this new feature will make it more difficult for this content to resurface in the midst of favored content selected to be “seen first.”
In an interview with TechCrunch, Facebook News Feed Product Manager, Greg Marra, reassures businesses that these changes are likely to not have a drastic effect on marketing. In fact, if companies are able to persuade users to prioritize their content instead of just “liking” their page, this will actually provide a greater platform for communication between companies and consumers, especially for businesses that prioritize customer loyalty.
Whether users will be willing to devote their limited News Feed space to their favored brands is still unclear.
What are your thoughts on “see first”? Do you think it’ll benefit or break your business’s Facebook efforts?
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