Facebook Home Feed Changes May Improve Reach & Discoverability

Updates to Facebook’s home feed have the potential to improve your content reach and get your brand in front of new audiences.

Facebook is gearing its primary feed toward discovering new content, serving users with personalized recommendations as soon as they open the app.

A secondary feed contains content from people a user is friends with and pages they choose to follow.

The addition of an algorithmically generated feed of content suggestions is almost sure to impact Facebook’s content distribution.

Is that a good thing for marketers?

Here’s a full recap of all the changes Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced.

Facebook Home Feed Gets Split In Two

Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s home feed is getting split into two tabs; Home and Feed.

Home is the tab you first see when you open Facebook, while Feed is the tab with content you’ve opted into seeing.

Zuckerberg emphasizes the benefits of the new Feed tab, which makes it easier to keep up with posts from friends and family.

For content creators and businesses working on expanding their audience on Facebook, the Home tab is the most intriguing part of today’s announcements.

New Home Tab Turns Facebook Into A Discovery Engine

Facebook’s new Home tab is a departure from the experience people are used to.

Previously, you may have opened Facebook to see a post from a friend or a favorite local business page.

You might now open Facebook and see personalized content from pages you’ve never engaged with.

Many publications are describing the new feed as “TikTok-like,” which is true because it’s now an endless rabbit hole of content recommendations.

Design-wise, Facebook’s Home tab isn’t drastically different from the old feed.

Yes, the Home tab contains Reels and Stories, so it may appear TikTok-like at first glance. However, it continues to surface regular photo, video, and text posts.

You’ll even see content from friends interspersed between the suggested posts, which means the updated feed isn’t taking away anything.

This update adds to the Facebook experience by serving additional content users wouldn’t ordinarily see.

As a result of the increase in content suggestions, people and pages may have an easier time building an audience on Facebook.

In a blog post, Facebook explains how the new Home feed recommends content:

“Your Home tab is uniquely personalized to you through our machine learning ranking system. This system takes into account thousands of signals to help cut through the clutter and rank content in the order we think you will find most valuable. We’re investing in AI to best serve recommended content in this ranked experience.”

In the coming months, we’ll better understand what this update means for businesses and marketers.

Changes are rolling out starting today. You’ll know you have the update when you see the new Feeds tab in the shortcuts bar.

Sources: Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg
Featured Image: DVKi/Shutterstock