Yesterday, Facebook announced changes to its News Feed that are more significant than you might imagine, especially in the world of what we do here at Shift Key — content marketing.
Read the full alert from Facebook: http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2015/07/updated-controls-for-news-feed/
We’ll give you the CliffsNotes version here. If you have a lot of Facebook friends, follow a lot of pages, or belong to a lot of groups, your News Feed can be overwhelming at best and an addictive time suck at worst. It’s no wonder Facebook commanded one-fourth of all traffic across the web last year!
If you’d like to reign in your Facebook addiction and better manage your time when endlessly scrolling through your News Feed, you’re in luck. Users can now hand-pick a few key friends or Pages to follow and prioritize, and the continued process of how to privately “unfollow” people just got easier as well.
Here’s how to make these changes when viewing the Facebook app on an iPhone (not available for Android or desktop versions yet):
(1) Look at the menu at the bottom of your screen and click “More” at the far right-hand corner. Scroll to the bottom and look under the “Settings” header. Click “News Feed Preferences.” Boom. Adjust accordingly. (Caveat: Make sure you have the most recent versions of the Facebook app and your iOS to see the full range of options here.)
(2) In reviewing your News Feed with updated preferences, there are still ways to modify on the fly. See the gray, downward-facing arrow to the right of each item in your Feed? Click it to make further modifications.
Instead of endlessly scrolling through posts about kittens, political rants or low-carb recipes, you can simply say, “I don’t want to see posts like this” — or even, “Unfollow” this person.
Also, here’s another little-known feature hidden in that same menu to the upper-right of each News Feed item: “Turn on notifications.” No longer do you have to comment “Following” to keep up with these items. Follow posts privately and without cluttering up the comments of a large group post, for example.
The ability to make these types of customizations generally goes over well, especially when you consider how much time people spend on Facebook each day, and how irritating it can be to scroll through undesirable content (which up until now, there was little the user could do to manage).
But think about what this means for any Facebook Pages you manage? Is your content interesting and relevant enough to make the cut?
If you’ve been paying a company to post frequent, generic graphics or one-liners that have nothing to do with your brand, in an effort to keep your account “active” and artificially boost your “likes,” your Page might be in trouble! Time to re-think your social media posting frequency and strategy in relation to your overall content marketing efforts.
As is so often the case, those Pages, organizations or brands who have the best content are going to win this game.
At Shift Key, we make communication capital. We are journalists who know how to create original content, the foundational layer of digital marketing. We understand audience and the information your audience wants – whether you are an agency, brand, company or non-profit. Content is the bedrock of digital marketing. Shift Key creates unique and informative content that feeds marketing activities across a mounting number of channels, generating buzz for brands and leads for products and services.