Facebook is about to deploy a variant of its News Feed that focuses exclusively on content from businesses, celebrities, news publishers and others who use Facebook Pages to pump out content.
Facebook has been testing the special News Feed view over the last few weeks and plans to start rolling it out to all users later today. “It’s a ‘Pages only’ view of your news feed, making it even easier for people to keep up with the Pages they care about most,” a spokesperson writes. “You can access the new feed view from your home page by clicking ‘Pages feed’ on the left hand side of the page.” The feed will select the most relevant pages posts for you algorithmically, meaning that you aren’t guaranteed to see all posts from all the pages you follow. But you’ll see more pages content than you would in the aggressively filtered regular News Feed.
Facebook insists the new view of its popular News Feed was not built in response to well-publicized criticism from celebrities like Star Trek star George Takei and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who have been vocal in their unhappiness with how Facebook Pages are handled within the regular News Feed. Instead, says Facebook, the pages view of News Feed sprang from requests from page owners and News Feed users.
“‘Pages only’ view makes it even easier for people to keep up with the Pages you care about most.”
But there’s no question the new News Feed view will help allay anger from celebrities, small business owners, and publishers over how hard it has become for them to get their pages posts in front of all the people who follow their pages. A typical post to a Facebook page is seen by less than a fifth of the people who follow that page, because Facebook uses a relevance algorithm to selectively insert page posts into users’ News Feeds. In September, Facebook tightened the algorithm so that even fewer posts made it into the feeds, saying users were complaining about content from page owners.
“We made an adjustment to the news feed algorithm to respond to the negative feedback signals of spam and people hiding posts,” a Facebook spokesperson told us after the change was made.
Some of Facebook’s more vociferous critics are convinced the social network is keeping posts out of the News Feed to encourage page owners to buy “promoted post” advertising, which can circumvent the News Feed filters. But Facebook has a history of altering News Feed without regard to its bottom line; a prior tightening of News Feed reduced spammy posts from Zynga videogames and cut into Facebook’s payments revenue, which was dependent on the games.
Takei, Cuban, and other page owners are likely to be pleased by the new News Feed view — and unlikely to be entirely satisfied. Page owners want to maximize how many fans their content is pushed to while minimizing their costs. In other words, they want cheap access to the increasingly precious resource of user attention. Facebook will never be able to fulfill their dreams, but it’s found a clever way to temper their anger.
Facebook Has Good News for George Takei and Mark Cuban
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Facebook Has Good News for George Takei and Mark Cuban
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Facebook Has Good News for George Takei and Mark Cuban
