Facebook is redesigning it’s news feed in an attempt to increase relevance and become a central web portal for users. Highlights:
- Top Stories Feature: Facebook is developing an algorithm to display the most interesting posts from a user’s friends, presumably based on previous “likes” and comments.
- Groups have gotten an overhaul. They’ll begin to look a lot more like pages and activity that a users friends do in groups that the user is a part of will be displayed in his or her feed. Group admins still can’t push updates to the whole group - for that kind of reach, a page is still optimal.
- Virtual gifts, event RSVPs and friends who fan a page will now show up in the news feed
The more emphasis Facebook puts on the homepage and the news feed, the more it becomes a user’s main way to connect on Facebook. Users are being trained to use the news feed and rely on it for processing information about their network. Any brand that’s not regularly showing up in that feed is going to be easily lost. Facebook has added new ways to get featured there, but this underscores the importance of publishing frequently via a Facebook in order to keep a presence on fans’ news feeds.
In my opinion content creation and publishing schedules are major pieces of a successful approach to social media and Facebook in particular, and these new changes only stress that point. I use a template with all of our clients that might be helpful for getting started: Facebook Publishing Schedule Template.
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