Where’d my news feed go?

Facebook is changing… AGAIN… and it could very likely impact the way you interact and share information about your organization with users who have liked your page. According to an article by Josh Constine with Techcrunch.com, the powers that be within the Facebook universe are finally revamping an aspect of the service that has been pretty much stagnant since its introduction in 2006, the News Feed. Being that this is the most common way for organizations, advertisers and Facebook page administrators to get their valuable content in front of the masses it could have some interesting implications on nonprofits that rely on Facebook to interact with their most important fans.

What’s changing, you ask? Well, according to the folks at TechCrunch, at a recent press event Facebook “launched content-specific feeds for Photos, Music and more”. The service will now highlight its dedicated feeds more prominently and make them much more accessible when a user logs on.

What does this mean for organizations and administrators trying to interact with their fans? It means if users want to, it will be much easier to focus in on the exact content they wish to view and that your Page updates won’t necessarily be displayed to the users the way they have in the past. It also means that if you want your fans to view and interact with your content you may have to do more to provide the quality content needed to entice them to use the dedicated Page feed.

Luckily, according to TechCrunch, Facebook is adding some features that make it easier to provide rich and engrossing content on Pages and within the various News Feeds. Facebook is going to allow media and posts to be displayed in a “larger”, more “vivid” format that could do wonders to attract users to your content. We will see how it all plays out but it sounds like it will be easier to imbed higher quality images and video. Constine suggests, the key goal of Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg’s changes is creating new opportunities for organizations and users to interact in a much more “immersive” way.

It’s hard to predict how users will react to this new format since we’ve seen them get pretty upset when Facebook altered other aspects of the service in the past. With these pending changes, it’s likely best to proceed with caution until it becomes more clear what the response and implications will be. As a general rule, quality over quantity is a best practice when interacting with people in their recreational setting. We’ll be interested to see if everybody can find a way to play nicely in this ever-changing social sandbox.

Aaron Lattanzio
Community Outreach and Sandbox Coordinator

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/05/facebook-news-feeds-launch/