Facebook News Feed Revamp: Focus on Meaningful Social Interactions
MENLO PARK, Calif. – For the past decade, Facebook has been a growing social media community that caters to an individual’s personal or business needs. It is one of the leading social media platforms, and its goal is to connect people.
However, this year, the company aims to revolutionize the social media news feed we have known for years and change it into something more intimate and personal.
With this change, the FB team anticipates less time for people to spend with their accounts as they try to lessen public posts. However, this prediction does not stop them to see the bigger picture. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, revealed one of their big focus areas for 2018 in his post last Thursday. This year, he wants to make sure that the time people spend on their products is a time well spent.
He explained that he received a feedback that public content, pertaining to posts from businesses, brands, and media, tends to crowd out the more personal, more intimate moments from one’s news feed. The spread of public content became a barrier for users to see posts from the people they care about, posts from their family and friends that lead people to connect more with each other.
Mark Zuckerberg wants to shift the focus of an individual’s news feed to important posts from family and friends. He justified this goal by explaining that using social media to reach out and connect with people we care about is good for one’s well-being.
He explained that being more connected makes people less lonely and correlates with long-term happiness and health. Mark also added that passively watching videos or reading articles, even if its content is informative or entertaining, may not be as good as feeling personally connected.
With this, Facebook’s strategy is to focus on helping people find relevant content and create more meaningful social interactions. The major overhaul will have one’s news feed focus on what friends and family share. Mark Zuckerberg revealed that they started making these kinds of changes last year. However, they anticipate that it will take months for this new focus to be recognizable and make its way through all their products.
Even though Facebook’s goal may look promising for the betterment of meaningful social interactions among people, these changes alarm small and big businesses that use social media as a platform for advertising and marketing. Social media advertising campaigns are one of the leading marketing platforms local businesses use to connect with their customers and potential clients.
Once the company rolls their agenda out, people will see less public content and advertisements which may greatly affect local businesses. One user commented that this movement of limiting the outreach of posts from a specific organization’s page is terrifying. Some also raised concerns whether the price for boosting posts and sponsored ads will go up.
It will be a challenging year for Mark Zuckerberg and his team as they try to lessen passive experience and promote healthy and real personal interaction. They might sacrifice a huge amount of user engagement. However, Facebook wants to make people realize that they have always been about personal connections.
