Facebook Is Making Its Most Critical Update To News Feed In 7 Years Tomorrow
It's one giant stream of your friends' updates, from music they're listening to articles they're reading, to pictures they're sharing.
Tomorrow, that's going to change.
TechCrunch has confirmed with sources inside and close to Facebook that there will be multiple News Feeds beginning tomorrow. The content can be sorted by categories at the user's discretion.
At the top, beneath the search bar, there will multiple Feed options. There will definitely be a Photo Feed, that will only show Facebook and Instagram photos (and maybe eventually photo ads). There will also be a Music Feed, displaying what people are listing to, what concerts they're attending and more.
There may be other feeds, such as Video and News, but TechCrunch didn't confirm those.
The new, segregated Feeds are a smart move for Facebook, and the announcement doesn't come as a shocker. Zuckerberg has alluded to them during recent press announcements and earnings calls.
The new feeds will get rid of a lot of the current clutter. In theory, users will spend more time engaging with the content because they'll be choosing exactly what they want to see; stories won't get buried by boring, irrelevant user updates.
Having multiple feeds is also smart from an advertising perspective. Advertising content can be tucked into a photo-only feed, or a video-only feed without seeming out of place. And advertisers are willing to pay big bucks for rich experiences, especially when it comes to video.
For more on the move to multiple feeds, we can review what Zuckerberg said in the January 30 earnings call:
Advertisers want really rich things like big pictures or videos, and we haven’t provided those things historically. But one of the things that we’ve done in the last year, as you’ve seen, the organic News Feed product that consumers use are moving towards bigger pictures, richer media, and I think you will continue to see it go in that direction. And then, I think a lot of the success of products like Instagram is because of that. It’s very immersive even on a small screen, it’s a wonderful photo product, and when you have those form factors for the content that gives you the ability to offer those form factors for advertising as well.
So I think you see the trend there in terms of where it’s going and that’s just naturally going to make it, so we can deliver much more engaging advertising experiences than we were traditionally able to do and when we didn’t have those types of content in the system.