Facebook recently ‘upgraded’ some of its news feed features by implementing a lists option, subscriptions, a ‘top’ news feed and a real-time news feed.
Lists: This feature allows you to segment your friends into various lists and only see posts from those people. Facebook has automatically placed your friends into lists based on their profile information and mine, linking commonalities. Lists are optional, and thank goodness because assigning each one of your friends to a list could be quite time-consuming.
Subscribe Button: In an effort to give users more control of the frequency that they see their friends’ posts, Facebook implemented the subscribe button. According to Facebook the button will now allow users to:
- Choose what you see from people in News Feed
- Hear from people, even if you’re not friends
- Let people hear from you, even if you’re not friends
Catch that last one? Don’t get too freaked out, you are able to choose whether you’d like people you’re not friends with to subscribe to your posts. The problem here, is going through your friends and changing all of your settings. Read more on the new Facebook subscribe button.
News and real-time feed: In the image below you will see my news feed in the middle and on the side. The right-side bar is an auto update and the middle section posts stories that Facebook (and I by my list and subscription settings) deem appropriate. The cool thing about the real-time feed is that you can view the photo, event, video, or comment chain just by hovering over the update. What does this mean for your business page? See below!
All of this wreaks of Facebook’s attempt to capitalize on Google+’s ‘circles’ feature and Twitter’s ‘real-time’ communication. But, will it work? Recently Facebook updates have become a long line of failed attempts. Facebook Places failed. So did Facebook’s attempt at Groupon with their own ‘Deals’ application. But, what does all of this mean for your business? Will your posts show up in the middle sections? As a real-time feed? It’s uncertain at this point since subscriptions are not able to be altered for pages. From what I’ve seen, posts from pages will show up in the big feed when they’re often commented on or recommended with the ‘like’ button.
