The News Feed is a central hub on Facebook where a user goes first, and where they get all of the news from their Friends and Pages in one place.
For Page Admins this space is especially important, because many statistics have suggested that the majority of users NEVER return to your Page after becoming a fan. They just see your updates in their News Feed.
So these changes in the News Feed interface are important to all Page Admins out there — we need to understand how users are interacting with our stories as they appear on their homepages.
You Can Also Add Pages to Smart Lists!
As I was writing this post and researching Smart Lists, I thought to myself, “Can you add Pages to lists?” And guess what? You can! It’s just as easy as adding Friends to a list.
You can now use lists to organize News Feeds from all of the Pages that you have liked. I have created lists for various types of Pages, as you can see here:
You could create a list just for your Client Pages, or Pages that you Administer. Then you can easily monitor those updates by switching between News Feeds.
To add Pages to a list, or to create a list specifically for certain Pages, just go to “Manage List” and click on “Add/Remove” friends. You can choose to see just Pages and easily click to add them to your list:
Organize your lists by category, and you can quickly see different News Feeds of specific content:
Add Lists to Favorites for Easy News Feed Switching
With the new Smart Lists feature, you can now easily curate the content of your News Feed.
Add lists to your “Favorites” and you will see them appear at the top of your left-column menu on the Facebook homepage. Then you can easily toggle back and forth between a full News Feed and a curated feed of just specific news.
When you click on a list, your News Feed becomes a stream of updates JUST from those friends on your list!
Managing Your Lists
You can easily add and remove friends from lists. There is also an easy way to merge lists together if you have duplicates.
How to Hide Stories and People in your News Feed
For a short period of time, Facebook changed this option, but never fear! You can once again easily hide people’s stories from your news feed without having to “un-friend” them.
And there is good news for Pages: users have the option of just hiding a single story, as well as hiding all stories.
Here is a screenshot of how to hide stories from a Friend (which is now called “unsubscribing”). You can either hide individual stories, or unsubscribe from their updates all together.
Facebook ALSO now offers tiers of subscription!
- All Stories
- Most Stories
- Important Stories
The Ticker
What is that thing in the upper right-hand corner of your Facebook screen? If you use the new-ish versions of chat in your right sidebar, the Ticker now appears right above that, and updates in real time. Facebook has explained that the Ticker is for “lighter” news than the stories that appear in your main News Feed.
image credit - Facebook Blog
“Ticker: Join Friends in Real-Time. News Feed often has a time lag. Usually when you’re on Facebook, a lot of your friends are too. Until now, there hasn’t been an easy way to see and chat with your friends about photos, articles, and other things they’re posting in real-time. The new ticker helps you do just that.”
So, a quick summary of the Ticker:
- “Lighter” news stories appear here;
- Updates in real time;
- Hover to see stories, interact directly in pop-up box;
Top Stories: What they are and how to control them
Top Stories will appear in your News Feed if they have been flagged as a top story and/or if they have gotten lots of attention (like and comments) over a short period of time. Facebook thinks that these stories are more important and should appear prominently. You will see them designated with a blue triangle in the upper left corner.
Top Stories appear at the top of your News Feed stream, and Recent Stories appear below. You can see the header that designates a the Recent Stories section, but you have the option of flagging a story as a Top Story if you want:
Recent Stories v. Top Stories
You can also mark a story as a “top story” by clicking on that blue triangle in the corner, and you will see this message:
You can um-mark a story as a “top story” by clicking on that blue triangle in the corner, and you will see this message:
Do you think that the new News Feed settings will make it more difficult for Page stories to appear in fans’ streams? Is Facebook making it more and more difficult to be seen on their platform without purchasing advertising? Share your thoughts!