What Facebook's Friends and Family News Feed Focus Means for Marketers
Facebook is known as a prominent source for discovering great content that connects users in a meaningful way. Its regularly updated list of stories in the middle of one’s profile wall inspires engagement that helps users stay knowledgeable about what interests their friends. And Facebook has been continuously working to improve its news feed.
One of the ways they achieve this is through qualitative surveys sent out to users daily. Facebook is relying on feedback from real users to critique its service, which is a thoughtful approach. These daily surveys indicate Facebook’s interest in showing the most relevant stories to users, in addition to optimizing overall user satisfaction. Now, they want to take things further.
The News Feed Values of Facebook
Facebook is in the process of redesigning its news feed to put the focus on family and friends. This means listing more posts from loved ones and decreasing the number of posts shown by publishers. The goal is to create a social atmosphere of stronger intimacy. Executing this update is based on user feedback about not getting enough news from close ties, especially with a lot of contacts added.
Facebook is relying on a set of core values to make this happen, which promote business integrity and a great user experience. It’s about facilitating smarter connections driven by inclusivity, honesty, autonomy, and constant growth.
Prioritization of Family and Friends
Facebook’s number one priority is to connect users with people, places, and things they want to be connected to, starting with friendships. To ensure users don’t miss posts from family and friends, Facebook puts them at the top of their news feed. In addition to this, users desire to view informative and entertaining content, which is being given higher priority. As a result, publishers are expected to have less space to share their content, including social media advertising efforts.
This will likely require marketers to make shareable content much more engaging to attract users. Marketers can expect a drop in user reach based on sharing their own content. But this isn’t exactly the same case for content shared by users. Regular interaction with publishers posts on their profile walls can help sustain traffic to a larger degree.
Facebook desires to put authentic stories before the eyes of viewers.
The Future of Facebook Marketing
Marketers will just have to come to terms with the fact that Facebook is putting users first. Facebook is even making the move to put users above their own monetization. But this is for the greater good of everyone. Of course, Facebook can’t continue as a business if they don’t have interaction with users. And without Facebook, marketers can’t rely on it as a practical destination for social media advertising and other promotion techniques.
The key to avoiding the downfall of Facebook is giving users more and more control over their interface experience. The more users can stay in the loop about what’s going on with family and friends, the more likely they are to stick around. This can actually provide a more consistent experience of growth for marketers. But they will have to overcome the drop in traffic that’s expected during the beginning of this update and let things stabilize over time.
As a marketer, this change may feel like a big bump in the road for you, but see the good in this situation. It can increase user interaction and prolong your social media advertising efforts for conversion optimization. For more awesome blog content, read How Feed Quality Affects Google Shopping.
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