One of the changes to Facebook’s most recent set of updates is their news feed grouping feature. Facebook now groups updates that share a common topic (or word) together in the timeline.
Benefits of Facebook’s News Feed Grouping Feature
There are 2 potential ways this change may benefit you or your fan page.
- Updates about the same trending topic are shown at the top of your timeline page.
- If you post about a trending topic, your name & link to your profile or page has the potential to be seen by sets of eyes who may have not been by your page in a while, thus having a low affinity score with you or your page. A friend or fan seeing your update could bring them back to your page and increase the chances they’ll be seeing your future updates.
A Negative of Facebook’s News Feed Grouping Feature
It’s true that you can have too much of a good thing, though. If a topic you are posting about is extremely popular, you have an increased chance of being lumped together with a high number of similar updates (see photo example above), essentially hiding your update from your friends and fans.
The solution?
If you want to post, say, about a holiday or some other national event or news story, try to tweak the wording of your status update to avoid using the most popular term. As you can see in the example above, Facebook notes that these 25 people all posted about “Veteran’s Day”. Perhaps writing copy that includes “honoring those who served our country” would be a good alternative.
What has your experience been with the new Facebook news feed grouping feature? Do you like being presented with multiple posts on the same topic?
I was totally confused at first. Now I have to say it does clean up my feed a little. Since they are all lumped together, I only have to read a couple of them 😉 it could definitely work for me if I was posting about something celebrity related.
Good tip!
I hadn’t really made much attention to the new grouping feature, but I like it. It keeps my front page from being as clogged up. Now, if five of my friends share the same article, it gets grouped so I only see it once and can read/comment accordingly.
*paid much attention!
Hi ladies,
Another super informative post. I always learn something new from you guys.
I am a bit torn about the change. Sometimes it is helpful and other times it is system overload.