A post on Facebook’s blog outlines the social media site’s plans to give users greater control of their news feed and the type of content that appears on it.
Last week, some Facebook users became able to select whether they want to see more or fewer posts from the friends, groups and pages they follow, as well as letting the site know what sort of topics they wanted to see updates on.
Facebook already offers tools to allow customisation of news feeds, but they are somewhat buried in the user settings and many are not aware of them. The post goes on to say that features like Favourites, Unfollow and Snooze will be made easier to access so that users are in control of what they see when they use Facebook.
The site says it will be rolling these features out to more users in the coming weeks.
What does this mean for businesses?
Over the years, some Facebook users have called for fewer news and company posts to appear in their feeds, and for it to return to its original format of simply displaying posts from friends in the chronological order they were posted. Such a move might cause concern to businesses using Facebook as part of a marketing campaign, but Facebook argues that users generally do not want this, pointing to a 2018 study that involved removing the ranking algorithms for a small number of users actually resulting in them using the platform less.
It’s worth noting that Facebook is also making plans to expand Topic Exclusion, where users can filter out content on subjects they would rather not see in their news feeds. This is all the more reason for marketers to avoid sensitive subjects like politics and tragedy, especially since Facebook says excluding “Tragedy and Conflict” is a 99% effective way to avoid seeing content of this nature.
It seems users are not crying out to limit their Facebook news feeds to posts from their friends, but they want to see content that has value to them and piques their interest. At Engage Web, we can help you provide the sort of engaging website and social media content users want to see, so why not have a chat with us to find out how we can help?
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