Facebook announced a new feature for iOS devices today – NewsFeed preferences. For more details please follow their official note on their NewsRoom: http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2015/07/updated-controls-for-news-feed/
What it brings to users? Well, to be said in a nutshell: user can now control its Newsfeed better. Let me deep digger more on this topic. It brings you new ways how you can influence what is visible on your NewsFeeed:
- Select friends and Pages to see first
basically, friends and pages you choose in setting will get more space in terms of visibility on your NewsFeed - Find new Pages to connect to
given you behavior on Facebook (engagement, what your friends like etc.), new Pages will be offered to a user to click on a magic button “Like” - Select which friends and Pages to follow or unfollow
in my opinion this feature means truly NewsFeed cleanup as a list of top people, pages, groups will be shown to you to follow/unfollow. Therefore you can prioritize posts you want to see
It sounds nice, right? However, as usual in daily life there is a tradeoff. Let’s take it from Facebook’s and marketeers point of view.
By selecting preferred options you simply give information what people, pages, groups you give more priority -> those (and especially consider mainly brands having Pages on Facebook) can use the feature “See first” as well as “Find new Pages”. If there will be some stats to those newly released features then maybe some form of predictive analytics might be knocking on the door. Especially, seeing some trends in following/unfollowing people/brands would be sufficient to observe raising opinion influencers/brands for specific areas.
Overall, it gives cleaner NewsFeed for users and new space for social media marketing as well as new revenue stream for Facebook.
