Facebook’s home feed is making some new changes, and it could help businesses pages leaps and bounds to improve their reach. Facebook is shifting its focus to helping brands get their content in front of new audiences. The idea is to help people discover new content that they are interested in but not currently connected with. Here’s the rundown of all the changes recently announced by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Facebook Feeds and Home Tab
Moving forward, the home feed will be split in two; Home and Feed. The Home tab is the default page you see when you first open up Facebook. The Feeb tab will now be filtered content that you’ve opted into seeing. This new change, according to Zuckerberg, is to make it easier to keep up with posts from you’re favorites, such as friends and family, without their content getting lost in the shuffle. The Home tab now becomes a place of discovery. Users will be able to encounter new content, and brands will have the opportunity to expand their reach to their target audience.
Home Tab Changes
Much like Instagram, Facebook has been enhancing its platform based on what they see in algorithms. The takeaway is that users want to see content that matters to them and not content that feels pushed.
Prior to this change, you would open the home page to find recent posts from friends, family, or a local business you follow. Now you’ll see more personalized or recommended content from pages you’ve never engaged with. Although you’ll still see Reels and Stories, it will continue to provide a balance of photo, video, and text posts.
This update adds to the Facebook user experience by serving additional content to users that wouldn’t ordinarily see it. The result is increased content suggestions, people, and pages, helping them to find their place in all the noise. Here’s how Facebook explains the Home Feed:
“Your Home tab is uniquely personalized to you through our machine learning ranking system. This system takes into account thousands of signals to help cut through the clutter and rank content in the order we think you will find most valuable. We’re investing in AI to best serve recommended content in this ranked experience.”
The bottom line is that the Home tab has turned into a discovery engine. When you want to find fresh content or discover new recommendations based on your current interest, the Home tab makes it easier to find it.
Feeds Tab Features
The Feeds tab is the section of Facebook you control. It also allows you to easily find posts from people or brands you are already connected with. You can also create a ‘favorites’ list of the people and pages you care about the most. You can also filter this content to prioritize which content you want to see first from this filtered list. Some may also find it refreshing that there are no Suggested For You posts. However, sponsored ads will appear in Feeds.
The Feeds tab also breaks up content by Friends, Groups, and Pages that you already follow. This is in response to users complaining about not being able to set defaults and filters on social media apps. This categorization allows user to shift their mass volume of content in a more controlled way.
Users should already have access to Feed through the shortcut bar at the bottom of their page.
What These Changes Mean
This change is all designed to give people more options on what they want to see. While the Home tab is where you’ll find new discoveries through your passions and interest, you can turn to Feeds to stay up-to-date with the people and places you already know.
Knowing that Facebook is heavily relying on algorithms, this change could backfire if the wrong recommendations are being made to its users. It’s no secret that this strategic shift was influenced by Tik-Tok, whose entire platform is made of suggested content based on their users’ interests. That being said, Facebook is a platform built on connections, and its users may not have much leniency if they fail to deliver on what its platform was originally about.
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