The Future of Your News Feed Means News you Actually Want to Read
Facebook announced early this week on their company blog that users would be seeing some changes in the way posts were ranked in their news feed. The social media powerhouse went on to explain that they were now putting more emphasis on how "good" a post was aside from their typical straightforward engagement metrics such as Likes and clicks. These factors may tell us some things about what draws us to that particular post, but it doesn't necessarily tell us everything.
This change did not come as much as a shock since the company had already started their research in early 2014 when 1000 Facebook users were paid to rate the quality of their news feed from 1 to 5. Facebook researchers then found that although certain posts may not receive as much engagement as others, they were still preferred by users over posts that may attract a lot of attention but end up frustrating or offending the user. For example, users may not necessarily like a post about someones loved one passing, but would care more about such knowledge than perhaps a post about someones day today activities or political views. The good old phrase "quality, not quantity" can be used to describe this perfectly.
According to Facebook's ,” Cheng Zhang, Software Engineer, the goal of News Feed is to show you the stories that matter most to you. “News Feed will begin to look at both the probability that you would want to see the story at the top of your feed and the probability that you will like, comment on, click or share a story,”.
In the weeks to come Facebook is set to add more functions such as an expansion to the like button which will let allow users to express emotions such as anger, sadness or love under a post. These changes are all user centric approaches that in essence help Facebook (and any online business) understand their users better and create a more human like algorithm for their post rankings. Just as Facebook wants to give users' news that they want to read, online businesses relate this case study directly to their campaigns. In order to sell or draw in traffic online you must find out what your modern day consumer wants and what they need. Once this has been determined you can switch your online approaches, predicate certain consumer probabilities and lastly better serve your potential buyer needs.
As we witness the evolution of digital marketing and switch our focuses on creating better engagement strategies we cannot help but notice it being on the forefront of the most successful online campaigns. It is without a doubt that to better understand your user, you must think just as them and consequently imagine their user experience. Implementing a solid engagement strategy will result in more traffic for your online business and generate more sales. Why? Because the more you give consumers what they want, the more they want it.
