Facebook released a new suite of tools meant to give users more control over what they see in their News Feed.
Users can categorize the friends and pages on their feed to four different preferences: Prioritize who to see first, unfollow people to hide their posts, reconnect with people you unfollowed, and discover new pages.
Users now have the ability to choose what posts they see first when they open Facebook on their iOS device and, soon, their browsers.
For brands, this is a new and strong feature to utilize. After their recent News Feed update, Facebook has provided users a way to navigate around their complex algorithm, allowing them to express, “I really want to see more of this.” This update means brands must tweak their social media strategies to get users to favorite their page by changing how they present social content. Brands will need to encourage users to engage with compelling content and calls to action in their social posts.
Notably, to remind users that they are seeing more of this content, a blue star is placed above the prioritized stories.
The new option allows users to select 30 accounts whose newest updates will always appear first in the News Feed. The missed posts will be grouped together, with two being visible with the option to see the other Facebook posts shared by the account.
While being in a person’s top 30 brings the Internet back to the Myspace days, being selected gives a brand exclusive, invite-only access to being the first-seen posts as users think, “I wonder what’s happening on Facebook.”
The newfound ability for Facebook’s 1.44 billion users to prioritize not just posts, but entire accounts, has brands and marketers excited at a new way to build their social audience.
And why not? This is a chance for them to work around the “popularity contest” news feed algorithm, increase their ROI and nab a boost in reach and engagement. Asking for a Likes and Shares on Facebook is fairly acceptable, so it follows that being “starred” will be too.
People make new friends and find new Pages to Like, but, chances are, they will not spend any more time on their News Feed. There are only so many hours in a day, and only so much of it will be spent on Facebook.
With the Facebook user base growing faster than the attention spans of its users, this new feature for marketers comes into play right as the value of a Like declines. Competition for reach and engagement on the social platform is at an all-time high.
With less time spent on the News Feed, Pages were competing for Facebook comments. Now, social media managers have a new way to build engagement and likes. Don’t get left in the dust as other marketers start strategizing new campaigns for the coveted blue star.
There’s also a new algorithm in the game with the “discover new pages” feature. Based on the types of pages a user has liked or people like the user have liked, they can discover new brands to follow based on similar features categorized by this new algorithm update.
This new feature is a great help for small businesses, news outlets, artists, or brands that might get overlooked in the Facebook crowd. Before, the only way to make sure posts were noticed and accounts got likes was to spend money on targeted Page Like ads, which lose their value over time.