Face­book Passes News Feed Con­trol to You

With more and more peo­ple get­ting hooked, or at least in­ter­ested, with Google+, Face­book just had to make a move. So, what’s Facebook’s de­ci­sion? Start with pass­ing the news feed con­trol to users—consumers, de­vel­op­ers, and mar­keters alike.

Ba­si­cally, what hap­pens is that the news feed fil­ter, which cat­e­go­rizes your friends’ or fans’ posts, is re­moved. This means when­ever you post some­thing, all your friends or fans will im­me­di­ately see it, if they are logged in at that spe­cific time.

With ap­peal­ing posts and ir­re­sistible of­fers, this can greatly help in our mar­ket­ing cam­paigns. And if your fans or friends „like” your posts, this can mean in­stant vi­ral boost. Of course, you will still have con­trol over who gets to see your posts and don’t. That is the con­trol Face­book is now of­fer­ing to de­vel­op­ers, busi­ness own­ers, and com­mon users.

Face­book News Feed Flood­gates Are Fi­nally Opened!

Al­though it might seem that users are able to see feeds in real time—exactly af­ter they are posted—the op­po­site is ac­tu­ally true. That is to say, up un­til now Face­book ac­tu­ally con­trols what feeds users are able to see: the feeds you get are from friends who are ac­tive users or those you con­stantly com­mu­ni­cate with. That means if a rel­a­tive or a close friend does not post of­ten on their ac­count, it will be likely that when they do post, it will be buried be­neath all the posts of those who log on to their Face­book regularly.

Now, this is some­thing that is dis­ad­van­ta­geous not only to com­mon users but par­tic­u­larly to busi­ness owners—to in­ter­net busi­ness own­ers like us.

Why?

First off, Face­book is meant to be a mar­ket­ing plat­form for de­vel­op­ers and busi­ness­men. Now, with mil­lions of us com­pet­ing on this pop­u­lar plat­form, get­ting recog­ni­tion is tough. With the Face­book ad­min­is­tra­tion fil­ter­ing what users see and don’t, our chances of get­ting more at­ten­tion are fur­ther diminished.

Sec­ond, in­ter­net busi­nesses don’t just use Face­book for mar­ket­ing but also for re­search. To know what our tar­get cus­tomers re­ally want to have, what changes they want to see, and what we can of­fer to guar­an­tee sales—that is one of our pri­mary goals in start­ing a Face­book ac­count. Sure, there is Face­book In­sight, and yes, we might be able to track leads with our web links. How­ever, those alone can’t pro­vide us with con­crete in­for­ma­tion. Only the posts, opin­ions, and ac­tiv­i­ties of our tar­get cus­tomers can re­ally give us eas­ily ac­tion­able data.

Last, with­out enough data, we can’t guar­an­tee that our new mar­ket­ing plans will ex­ceed or at least reach our ex­pec­ta­tion. While it is com­mon for busi­ness ex­per­i­ments and first launches to de­liver mediocre re­sults, it def­i­nitely pays to gain as much mar­ket data as pos­si­ble for our re­sults to con­tin­u­ously improve.

That is why the for­mer stance of Face­book in fil­ter­ing news feeds is highly unfavorable.

For­tu­nately, Face­book now un­der­stands that users, es­pe­cially de­vel­op­ers and busi­nesses, need more free­dom with re­gard to what feeds they get, what they don’t, and what they want oth­ers to see; Face­book fi­nally un­der­stands that while let­ting go of valu­able con­tent might be­come a weak­ness, it is also the only real way for this so­cial net­work to con­tin­u­ously grow and, per­haps, beat con­tin­u­ously ris­ing com­peti­tors like Google+.

In­ter­net Busi­nesses Tak­ing Ad­van­tage of the Re­vamped News Feeds

Al­though I keep say­ing that this big step Face­book is tak­ing will be of ben­e­fit to all type of users, there is no deny­ing that de­vel­op­ers and in­ter­net busi­nesses will be the ones to get the most out of this change.

Ba­si­cally, this re­vamped news feeds an­swer the three prob­lems I ear­lier noted. 

• First, it al­lows us to stand out in our tar­get cus­tomers’ news feeds, once they “liked” our page or ac­cepted our friend re­quest, if you are us­ing a per­sonal ac­count. When we post some­thing, they will in­stantly be no­ti­fied on their home pages.
• Next, we will gain in­stant ac­cess on their ac­tiv­i­ties. We will ef­fort­lessly dis­cover what ac­tiv­i­ties they like to do, what things they love to have, what apps they of­ten use, what games they will will­ingly rec­om­mend, and so on. This new wealth of in­for­ma­tion may be a lit­tle un­or­ga­nized in the be­gin­ning, but once you get the hang of it, it will beat any sim­ple sta­tis­tics tool out there on the market.
• Last, with the in­for­ma­tion we are able to gain, it will be eas­ier to cre­ate mar­ket­ing plans and prod­ucts that the mar­ket will def­i­nitely grab. There is no more try­ing in the dark; with enough data di­rectly ac­quired from our tar­get con­sumers, pro­duc­tion costs will be re­duced and rev­enues can in­crease more rapidly.

With this big change on the news feeds, Face­book might just re­gain the spot­light that Google+ is try­ing to steal away.