Facebook, over the past couple of weeks, has been rolling out a large number of tweaks in features across the social networking website, with more focus on the Newsfeed. Announcing another such change for business page owners today, Facebook has introduced See First, along with a couple of other nifty changes in the news feed.
For a long period of time now, marketers and page owners have complaining of the fact, that paid likes, which they get through Facebook’s advertising programs, aren;t organic enough. Meaning, most of those likes are fake one, and are probably just adding up to the numbers, without providing any significant reach or traffic to their websites.
Moreover, with increased competition among the gargantuan amount of pages present on Facebook to get into a user’s news feed, it has become increasingly difficult for even the most genuine pages to reach their right set of audience.
‘See First’, Facebook’s latest news feed tweak, makes sure that neither the user nor the page owner get frustrated over their own issues. And since Facebook has been more about users, rather than marketers/advertisers, lets get to the user part of ‘See First’, first.
News Feed is a personalized stream of stories that you build from the people and Pages you’ve connected to on Facebook. The goal of News Feed is to show you the stories that matter most to you. To do this, Facebook employs ranking to order stories based on how interesting it believes they are to you: specifically, whom you tend to interact with, and what kinds of content you tend to like and comment on.
With ‘See First’, you, as a user, can now select which friends and Pages you would like to see at the top of your News Feed. Within News Feed Preferences, tap on a friend’s profile picture to see their posts first. You will then see any new stories they’ve shared since your last visit to Facebook at the top of News Feed, with a star in the top right of their post so you know why they’re at the top. You can scroll down to see the rest of your News Feed normally.
So what’s in it for publishers ? Well, getting added to a user’s ‘See First’ list guarantees all your page posts will appear at the top of a user’s News Feed with a blue star. And how is that good for you ? Well, if you compare it with a fraction of likes, from your total page likes, which you get on your posts, you will realize what importance ‘See First’ holds for you as a marketer.
Apart from announcing the new ‘See First’ lists, Facebook also rolled out a couple of other news feed tweaks as well.
For example. it is now easier to search for more relevant pages, according to the choice of pages you’ve already liked. Facebook will now help you find new Pages to help you connect with publishers, artists and businesses you might be interested in. Based on the types of Pages you’ve liked in the past, you can discover new Pages in order to get more of the stories you care about.
Also, with an updated design of the tools Facebook previously launched, you can now see a list of the top people, Pages and groups that you’ve seen in your News Feed over the past week, and choose to unfollow any friend, Page or group if you don’t want to see their updates. You can also see who you’ve unfollowed in the past and choose to re-follow them at any time.
These features, along with See First, will be rolling out for the iOS app in the U.S., starting today. As for Android and Desktop platform, you can expect a gradual roll-out within the next few weeks.
