In an effort to take the focus off of fake news and an overload of information from business and community pages, Facebook has announced it is changing how posts are prioritized in its news feed. The news feed is what you see when you first open up the site on your computer or smartphone, or if you click on the “Home” button in Facebook.
The priority will soon be posts from friends and family, putting the emphasis back on communicating and sharing with those who matter most to you. You’ll see fewer recipes, celebrities, magazines, newspapers, and…authors.
Basically, any Facebook page will now be much less visible in people’s Facebook feed, although it’s hard to imagine how pages can possibly get any fewer views (cough cough).
For the uninitiated:
- A page is not the same as your personal profile and news feed. Your personal profile is what you get when you open a Facebook account.
- Pages are like mini websites used by people, businesses and organizations who want to promote their products, services, or information.
- Pages and personal profiles are not to be confused with groups. A Facebook group is one that people must join rather than just follow or like. You can’t “friend” a group. While a group is administered by one or two people (or more) and while these administrators may indeed be business owners or part of a marketing department, you’ll find a group to be more democratic, with less content posted by the group admins and more by group members. Groups are great for focused discussions on a particular topic, for sharing experiences and resources, giving advice and getting feedback.
Here are some ways to get around Facebook’s new policy:
- Start a group and invite everyone on your Facebook page to join. Groups, because they focus more on interaction between members, will be featured more prominently in news feeds. Here are the instructions on Facebook for creating a group.
- Educate your page followers to edit their news feed preferences to ensure they will continue to see your page posts.
- Invite everyone on your page to “friend” you on your personal Facebook profile page.
- Put more emphasis on LinkedIn and Twitter. Start playing with Instagram, which is actually a lot of fun.
- Use Facebook Live for recording videos rather than uploading videos to Facebook.
