Wednesday Words: News Feed

Okay, so today's word is an easy one - and probably a gimme - but as there are people who may not know certain words or may still be new to social media, we'll go ahead and define "News Feed."

The generic, non-social-network-specific, definition is a feed full of news.  With social media, we can use the term "news" loosely.

For Facebook, your news feed is what you see when you first login to Facebook.  It's all the posts from friends and families that they've posted as well as some posts from the pages and people you follow/like.  With Facebook you have the choice of reading Top Stories or Most Recent - and yes, it has a tendency to default to Top Stories randomly when you aren't expecting it and you have to tell it to go back.

Twitter's News Feed is called Timeline - not to be confused with Facebook profile Timelines).  This is where you can see everyone's tweets and retweets of people you follow as well as sponsored Tweets you may be interested in.  This is different from your profile where you see only your tweets.

Google's news feed is your "home" page in Google+.

I'm not sure if there are other "news feeds" out there, but those are the three dominant ones.

Wednesday Words are a series of definitions released on Wednesday each week regarding a word found specific to Facebook's social media platform, or may be a generic word dealing with social media.  These definitions are to help provide you with a better understanding of common and uncommon terms associated with Facebook and social media.   You can find all the Wednesday Words by clicking on the Wednesday Words tag below.

Friday Facts: Facebook Promising to Clean Up News Feed with New Algorithm

There has been a lot of buzz this past week talking about Facebook is planning to clean up the news feed by reducing the like/comment/share baiting posts that we see frequently in our news feeds, but the question is, how will it affect legitimate pages who are just trying to increase the number of people who see what they post because Facebook's algorithms suck and shows your posts to less than 5% of your fanbase.

You can check out the official announcement here.

Facebook answers the question about how will affect pages with the following:

Will this affect my Page?
The vast majority of publishers on Facebook are not posting feed spam so they should not be negatively impacted by these changes, and, if anything, may see a very small increase in News Feed distribution.

A smaller set of publishers who are frequently and intentionally creating feed spam will see their distribution decrease over the next few months.  We’re making these changes to ensure that feed spam content does not drown out the content that people really want to see on Facebook from the friends and Pages they care about.

The Next Web gives their views on the changes here.

Facebook, however, doesn't address how it will filter out the spammy, like-baiting posts from people who are legitimately trying to increase their views by encouraging their followers to like, share or comment or are running contests with those specifications.

What are your thoughts?  Is this a good thing?  How will it change how you market to your fanbase if you're a person who tries to run contests with like/sharing/comment posts?

Friday Facts: The Hard Truth About How The Facebook News Feed Works Now

Once again, another article I'm linking to offsite that provides a lot of information about changes Facebook made in December 2013. If you're like me, you noticed the number of people viewing your posts drastically dropped after December, no matter how big or small your Facebook Page was.

Few people understand how the new algorithms work, and this article doesn't totally explain them either - but it does provide proof that Facebook wants you to spend money to market your brand, large or small.

Just to quote a small section of the article:

• Facebook's guiding principle is that the News Feed should be full of stuff Facebook users want to see.
• Facebook has changed its mind about brands. It has decided that users do not really want to see a News Feed full of updates from brands – Tide, Dove, Pampers, Nyquil, etc. 

Not sure about anyone else, but if I like a page or are friends with someone I -WANT- to see what they're posting, not have Facebook decide what my feed should be full of or not full of.  And you may have also noticed that you see far less from friends who you know post regularly and your feed is now a few select people instead of everyone you know.

If you're interested in learning more, I strongly suggest you read more here: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-the-facebook-news-feed-works-2014-2#ixzz2tJKpHMGP