Mobile, Online, Social Media

Facebook’s new News Feed controls don’t go nearly far enough

newsfeedcontrols11Facebook has announced to much fanfare that, in its words, it’s giving people more control over what they see in their News Feed.

To do that Facebook will show people a summary of the pages and people they most frequently seen posts from and give them the option to Unfollow with a single tap. The thinking here obviously is that a person or page may show up too often than is really necessary for that individual, dominating the News Feed and crowding out other posts that may be of more interest.

Along those same lines, there are more controls for giving feedback on an individual story/post as people can now hide the post and then opt to see less from that page or person overall without going all the way and unfollowing, though that too is an option.

This actually ties into another recent story. During a recent Q&A (on Facebook, of course) Mark Zuckerberg addressed the fact that organic reach is diminishing for brand publishers. And just like others from Facebook have said before, he put the blame on the fact that there’s more being published there and so everyone is competing for attention in the News Feed. Here’s the quote, via INC:

“Post content your customers want to see,” he said. “We optimize the newsfeed to create the best experience for our users, not to help businesses reach as many people as possible.”

But Mark…that’s exactly what brands signed up for years ago.

See, brands of all stripes were sold massive reach for their stories back when Facebook opened up to them. All of a sudden they could connect with their fans in a unique and interactive way. And Facebook did everything it could to encourage them to build up their networks as large as possible.

Why was this a big deal? Because at the time the idea of connecting directly with consumers was fairly novel and full of promise. Options were pretty limited to email or direct mail, so the idea that for no charge (other than investing in an content publishing infrastructure) a company could speak to 10,000…100,000…3,000,000 fans was pretty groundbreaking. Since then, though, the ground has steadily shifted. Brands have seen reach slowly (and sometimes quickly) decline, often taking new fan acquisition with it.

So now we’re in a position where two things are in play:

  1. People still aren’t in complete control of their News Feed. While this gives them some feeling of control, it’s really just rearranging functionality that already exists. What strikes me though is that this is all about negative feedback. There’s no feature that says “Show more/all from this Page/Person,” which would have been nice and would have *really* added some controls for people to take advantage of.
  2. Brands and other publishers are being told to again double-down on Facebook (including the recent appeal to give them content to host on Facebook’s own servers) but are being told at the same time it’s kind of not worth their while because there’s a lot of competition they’ll have to fight through in order to get people’s attention.

I still think Facebook needs to give up more of the iron grip it continues to maintain around what people see. Right now I can choose between Top Stories (the algorithm-based feed) or Most Recent, which in theory shows me everything. But, aside from the negative actions mentioned above, there’s little people can do on a page by page basis. It would be nice to see them introduce something that let me rank pages I liked, so a 5 ranking would show me everything and a 1 would show me only what Facebook deems worthy.

Or – and this is just me being nuts – how about it go back to the original promise of unrestricted reach to the audience who have taken the positive action to associate with a page/brand? I know there’s not much money in that for Facebook but it’s what we all originally signed on for. And if it had started out with the ground rules it has in place today it’s hard to believe it would have become the preferred tool it is now.

Advertisements