Personal content: More of it is coming to your Facebook News Feed
In the mid 2000’s, thefacebook.com was founded out of the Harvard College dorms. A name change, decade-and-a-half and supersonic growth coupled with countless controversies later, Facebook is going back to their roots. Founded on the premise of improved social connection, Facebook became a platform of constant flux. For better or for worse, the content users were seeing on their News Feeds seemed to be inconsistent. This meant users weren’t feeling that social connection they had grown accustomed to. So, Facebook decided to change that recently and revert their focus back to personal content.
So, what exactly is personal content? As the name suggests, personal content refers to Facebook posts published by friends and family members rather than businesses or organizations. AdAge noticed a decline in such posting back in 2016. They found that “original sharing of personal stories — rather than posts about public information like news articles — dropped 21% year over year as of mid-2015, The Information, a tech news site, reported Wednesday (April, 07, 2016).” It appears that these stats continued into this year.
We recently wrote a blog post claiming that changes were on the horizon. We showcased the musings of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in which he conceded that “public content — posts from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments,” or personal content, that made the platform warm, fuzzy and successful. To him, 2018 was the year to make this happen. Now we’re starting to see features arise from this strategic upheaval.
The first such feature is known as Lists. There’s no crazy acronym or funky naming practices at play here. Lists allow Facebook users to create lists of any type – to-do, vacation wish, goal-based – in endearing designs. It is easy to see that this feature’s introduction is aimed at inspiring users to create more personal content and for those closest to you to engage with that content. HubSpot wrote about this new feature and situated it within Facebook’s changing landscape.
HubSpot also dove into something a little bit more revolutionary for the platform. They pointed out that even when Facebook rolled out reactions in 2016, users still longed for an ability to dislike offerings on Facebook. The focus is on personal content yet again, which has relit the fire for an dislike posts. Facebook’s response, according to HubSpot, is to test a feature that would allow users to downvote specific comments. Their post does, however, also remind the dislikers out there that this is not technically a “dislike button.”
That got us thinking about another reminder. Facebook’s new, potentially personal content inducing Lists feature reminded us of an offering Facebook introduced roughly two years ago. Lists is similar in look and feel to the design-driven, coloured background posts users were first able to create in 2016. We see a pattern. After Facebook’s admission last month, new features were rolled out. The same response occurred for the stats that AdAge pointed to from 2015. Though we aren’t entirely sure where Facebook goes from here, we do sense that more new features will arise. Along with it, more personal content will bless your News Feed.