Dive Brief:
- Facebook rolled out another change, allowing users to choose the posts that appear first.
- Users can now customize their news feeds by choosing from among their friends and from pages they have liked what they want to pin at the top of their feeds.
- This latest change marks just another example of Facebook deviating from its notoriously complex news feed algorithm, and that poses both opportunities and challenges for marketers and publishers alike.
Dive Insight:
Facebook is giving its users more control over their news feed allowing them to prioritize the posts that appear at the top of their news feeds. This gives marketers an opportunity to grab a lot more organic attention from their Facebook connections, but it also means that marketers have to be relevant enough that those connections choose to see those posts front and center.
The challenge for social media marketers is being interesting and relevant enough to make that cut. The move is also a tacit admission from the social network giant that its algorithm isn’t a perfect content serving overlord, and sometimes a “like” click on a post doesn’t mean the user wants to see more on that same subject.
Facebook is giving marketers a lot to ponder with a rash of changes including no longer charging for social clicks, testing how it’s charging for video ads, sharing ad revenue with video partners and altering the algorithm to emphasis video.