Facebook is certainly investing in it’s news feed and it should. The news feed is the life blood of the site and the first location a user must go when using Facebook. This rich content is fluid and interactive thus driving the majority of engagement on Facebook. This is why they’re always testing, tweaking and making changes constantly. User experience is at the forefront of the news feed’s development and Facebook’s best option to increase their revenues.
Much like Apple, Facebook’s success has comes down to the constant changes and improvements that they make even though users generally dislike change. Here are 4 major changes that you will be seeing in your news feed on an ongoing basis:
Games Within The Feed
Gaming is an important part of Facebook’s success because it keeps people coming back and helps to create an engaging social networking site. User’s complained that the games were clunky and not developed with the user in mind. Facebook is addressing this issue with the roll-out of a new lightweight gaming platform that is accessible in the news feed. This smaller introduction should help pull users to the full versions of the games and also make developers happy.
Read more about how this works in more detail here.
Trending Videos
Video sharing through the ticker and news feed has helped this new wave of video sharing but overall the content was low grade. This viral distribution is so important to Facebook that they’ve just started testing a trending video feature which will help users discover more content based on what their friends are watching. We shall see…
Starring Friends
Facebook and Google have had enough. The majority of users don’t use lists despite Facebook’s and Google’s best efforts. I use them, I tell others to use them but that’s not enough to get 900 million users on board. Most people seem to dislike that they must take the time to organize their friends into lists. Voila, Facebook is launching a solution. Facebook would like to help you find the most relevant content to show you in your news feed. Facebook is testing a new starring version which makes it easy to organize who you want to see more content from. This will drastically change which of your friend’s appear within your feed as we must compete to be stared to keep appearing in news feeds, unless you have enriching and entertaining content that is.
Hello Brands, are you worried? Well, read the next feature.
Promote Your Page Posts
http://www.facebook.com/help/promote
Facebook’s “Promoted Posts” are a simple way to reach more of the people who like your Page and their friends. Visit your Page to try promoting a post. promote posts adds another level of interaction from the recent Facebook offers. I agree with Facbeook when they say that “Promoted posts are a simple way to reach more of the people who like your Page and their friends” but we’ll see if they’re successful or if they go the way of Facebook Deals.
How do you feel about these new changes? Let me know in the comments or tweet me @peterlang.
Cheers,
Peter