The Power of Facebook’s New News Feed

Great news for Facebook Page owners: Facebook has just pushed out a substantial and thoughtful redesign of its News Feed. On the bare surface, the changes might not look that exciting. But make no mistake. With this redesign, Facebook Pages have gained a lot more communicative power.

What are the details? Among other changes, Facebook has re-added “user activity stories” (including fan-join stories) to the News Feed. This means that stories like “John became a fan of your brand” can now serve as powerful and continuous viral drivers to your Page: if I become your Facebook fan, this action can now be broadcast to a majority of my network via my friends’ Facebook homepages.

In practical terms, this is huge. One user’s single fan-join can translate into hundreds of brand exposures.

In addition, Facebook has separated out its real-time stream from the new News Feed. The former will still be accessible via a “Live Feed” link, while the latter has been refreshed in order to present more relevant stories to Facebook users.

Here, “relevance” is part of Facebook’s secret sauce: no third party has access to the algorithm that determines more relevant and most relevant News Feed stories. We do know, though (based on Facebook’s on-the-record statements), that the algorithm gives a lot of weight to the publicly determined popularity of individual content items. In other words, the more likes and comments that your story (e.g., a status update published on your Facebook Page Wall) attracts, the more chance it stands of being featured on your friends’ and fans’ News Feeds.

Page owners should see this news as a welcome opportunity — or, more exactly, a friendly invitation from Facebook to keep on one’s toes. If you’re committed to growing your fan base, promoting brand exposure and loyalty, and reaching a viral tipping point, it’s in your interest to create and frequently post engaging content on your Facebook Page Wall, in order to win prime placement on News Feeds everywhere. Otherwise, your competitors might beat you to the punch.

Need some tips for generating Page engagement? These have worked well for a lot of our customers:

- Don’t depend too much on any one particular form of content. Text and images are one thing, but it would be much better, for example, to provide your Page fans with interactive polls, shareable videos, live Twitter streams, etc. Rich content creates more points-of-entry for your current and prospective fans to discuss and spread your brand.

- Share directly with friends and fans who are likely to view your updates and like/comment. Don’t be afraid to tap into your personal networks in order to seed your Page. Often times, participation from this sub-segment is enough to catalyze significant fan base growth.

- Make sure that your status updates contain clear calls-to-action and clear statements of value. What do you want your audience to do, and what incentive are you creating for them to act? Publishing a Wall post that says “We’ve just posted a new video!” is not nearly as good as saying “Watch our exclusive new U2 video interview right now — you’ll only find it here on our Facebook Page!” The former is rather general, while the latter provides more direction as well as a better sense of what’s unique about your Page (in this case, exclusive content).

- Ask your fans! If you need help figuring out what kinds of content you should feature on your Page, consider asking your fans directly via an Involver-powered poll/survey. This is an easy way to do audience research, while showing your community that you’re committed to incorporating its feedback.

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