During the month of January, as the world transitioned from the numbers ‘17 to ‘18, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made the startling announcement that Facebook was gunning to change the way its News Feed presented content. This change was to help prioritize posts made by friends and family over those made by businesses and public pages in an effort to boost “meaningful social interactions,” as Zuckerberg stated.
Since then, the social media conglomerate performed a cloak-and-dagger experiment with 6 different countries, testing the waters on a fresh New Feed feature they called “Explore.”
It did not go well.
What Happened
Facebook rolled out Explore in Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Serbia. Explore separated users’ News Feeds into two different feeds – one for friends and family (as part of Facebook’s blanketed promise to promote “Friends” related content), and another feed for “Pages” and public content.
The experiment, however, was greeted with a mixture of confusion and criticism, leading to unfavorable surveys from users and pessimistic reviews from independent news sources.
The Response
Due to the amount of negative feedback Facebook received, it appears that the platform has decided to go a different route than the one they had originally set their sights on at the beginning of 2018.
Head of Facebook’s news feed, Adam Mosseri, wrote in a blog post on Thursday, March 1st:
“We constantly try out new features, design changes and ranking updates to understand how we can make Facebook better for everyone….
The Explore Feed was a trial response to consistent feedback we received from people over the past year who said they want to see more from friends and family in News Feed. The idea was to create a version of Facebook with two different News Feeds: one as a dedicated place with posts from friends and family and another as a dedicated place for posts from Pages.”
With this change of direction, it appears many business and brand pages can now breathe a collective sigh of relief…and many users won’t have to adapt to a cumbersome change to an interface they are already so familiar with.
While change is never a bad thing (after all, we all at KWSM believe in constantly growing and challenging ourselves), sometimes there is something to gain from the old idiom:
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”Do you have questions regarding your brand’s social media? We can help! The team at KWSM runs a Facebook Live show, “Social Media Help Desk” hosted on our official Facebook page. Or, you can always email or call us!
